The Illuminatus! Trilogy

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."