Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

A man wearing a steel breastplate and helmet with gold inlay and a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee said, "It is now possible to predict with ninety-eight percent probability of accuracy that the Illuminati are setting up Fernando Poo for an international crisis. The question is, do we raid the island and get the records now, making sure they're not endangered, or do we wait and take advantage of the trouble as a cover for our raid?"

A man in a dragon-embroidered red silk robe said, "There will be no way to take advantage of the trouble, in my opinion. It will seem like chaos on the surface, but underneath the Illuminati will have everything very much under control. Now is the time to move."

A woman in a translucent silk blouse whose little vest did not hide her dark, rounded breasts, said, "You realize this could be a lovely scoop for your magazine, Mr. Malik. You could send a reporter there to look into conditions on Fernando Poo. Equatorial Guinea has all the usual problems of a developing African nation. Will tribal rivalries flare up between the Bubi and the Fang, preventing the further development of national cooperation? Will the poverty of the mainland province lead to attempts to expropriate the wealth of Fernando Poo? And what of the army? What, for example, of a certain Captain Jesus Tequila y Mota? An interview with the captain might prove to be a journalistic coup three years from now."

"Yes," said a big woman in colorfully dyed furs who played incessantly with the carved leg bone of some large animal. "We don't expect C. L. Sulzberger to grasp the importance of Fernando Poo until the crisis is upon the world. So, if advance warning is desirable- as we think it is- why not through Confrontation?"

"Is that why you asked me here?" said Joe. "To tell me something is going to happen in Fernando Poo? Where the hell is Fernando Poo, anyway?"

"Look it up in an atlas when you get back to work. It's one of several volcanic islands off the coast of Africa," said a dark-skinned, slit-eyed man wearing a buffalo hide decorated with feathers. "Of course, you understand that you could only hint at the real forces at work there," he added. "For instance, we wouldn't want you to mention that Fernando Poo is one of the last outcroppings of the continent of Atlantis, you know."

Mao Tsu-hsi was standing beside Joe with a glass containing a pinkish liquid. "Here, drink this," she said. "It will sharpen your perceptions."

A man in gold-braid-encrusted field marshal's uniform said, "Mr. Malik is the next business in order on our agenda. We are to educate him, to some extent Let's do it, to that extent."

The lights in the room went out. There was a rustling at one end, and suddenly Joe was looking at a brightly lit movie screen.

WHEN ATLANTIS RULED THE EARTH

The title appears in letters that look like blocks of stone piled on top of one another to form a kind of step pyramid. It is followed by shots of the earth as it looked thirty thousand years ago, during the great ice ages, showing woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers and Cro-Magnon hunters, while a narrator explains that at the same time the greatest civilization ever known by man is flourishing on the continent of Atlantis. The Atlanteans do not know anything about good or evil, the narrator explains. However, they all live to be five hundred years old and have no fear of death. The bodies of all Atlanteans are covered with fur, as with apes.

After seeing various domestic scenes in Zukong Gi-morlad-Siragosa, the largest and most central city on the continent (but not the capital, because the Atlanteans do not have a government), we move to a laboratory where the young (one hundred years old) scientist GRUAD is displaying a biological experiment to an associate, GAO TWONE. The experiment is a giant water-dwelling serpent-man. Gao Twone is impressed, but Gruad declares that he is bored; he wishes to change himself in some unexpected way. Gruad is already strange- unlike other Atlanteans, he is not covered with fur, but has only short blond hair on top of his head and a close-cropped beard. In comparison to other Atlanteans he seems hideously naked. He wears a high-collared pale green robe and gauntlets. He tells Gao Twone that he is tired of accumulating knowledge for the sake of knowledge. "It's just another guise for the pursuit of pleasure, to which too many of our fellow Atlanteans devote their lives. Of course, there's nothing wrong with pleasure- it moves the energies- but I feel that there is something higher and more heroic. I have no name for it yet, but I know it exists."

Gao Twone is somewhat shocked. "You, as a scientist, can talk of knowing something exists when you have no evidence?"

Gruad is dejected by this and admits, "My lens needs polishing." But after a moment he bounces back. "And yet, even though I have my moments of doubt, I think my lens really is clear. Of course, I must find lie evidence. But even now, before I start, I feel that I know what I will find. We could be greater and finer than we are. I look at what I am and sometimes I despise myself. I'm just a clever animal. An ape who has learned to play with tools. I want to be much more. I say we can be what the lloigor are, and even more. We can conquer time and seize eternity, even as they have. I mean to achieve that or destroy myself in the attempt."

The scene shifts to a banquet hall where INGEL RILD, a venerable Atlantean scientist, has called together prominent Atlanteans to celebrate a space research achievement, the production of a solar flare. Ingel Rild and his associates have developed a missile which, when it strikes the sun, can cause an explosion. He tells the marijuana-smoking gathering, "We can control to the second the timing of the flare and to the millimeter the distance it will spring out from the sun. A flare of sufficient magnitude could burn our planet to a crisp. A smaller flare could bombard the earth with radiations such that the area closest to the sun would be destroyed, while the rest of our world would suffer drastic changes. Most serious of all, perhaps, would be the biological changes these excessive radiations would bring about. Life forms would be damaged and perhaps become extinct. New life forms would arise. All of nature would undergo a tremendous upheaval. This has happened naturally once or twice. It happened seventy million years ago when the dinosaurs were suddenly wiped out and replaced by mammals. We still have much to learn about the mechanism that produces spontaneous solar flares. However, to be able to cause them artificially is a step toward predicting and possibly controlling them. When that stage is reached, our planet and our race will be protected from the kind of catastrophe that destroyed the dinosaurs."

After the applause, a woman named KAJECI asks whether it might not be disrespectful to tamper with "our father, the sun." Ingel Rild replies that man is a part of nature and what he does is natural and can't be construed as tampering. Now Gruad interrupts angrily, pointing out that he, an unattractive mutation, is the product of tampering with nature. He tells Ingel Rild that the Atlanteans do not truly understand nature and the order that controls it. He declares that man is subject to laws. All things in nature are, but man is different because he can disobey the natural laws that govern him. Gruad goes on, "With humanity we can speak, as we speak of our own machines, in terms of performance expected and performance delivered. If a machine does not do what it is designed for, we try to correct it. We want it to do what it ought to do, what it should do. I think we have the right and the duty to demand the same of people- that they perform as they ought to and should perform." An aged and merry-eyed scientist named LHUV KERAPHT interrupts, "But people are not machines, Gruad."