"You was to ask me," Starhawk said, "I'd guess that your boys goofed up twice. After they got excited and shot Murph with the wrong gun, they forgot something."
"Yes? Tell me?"
"They forgot to leave some of the coke behind. After all, that was supposed to be what Murphy and Mendoza were fighting over. You probably told them to leave a sizable amount."
"Not a sizable amount. It doesn't take much to cause two pigs to fight and kill each other."
"The reason the cops had to be offed," Starhawk said, "is that they didn't treat you with proper respect. Trying to sell you your own merchandise, at street prices. They should have been satisfied with a commission, the way I see it. You can't afford for guys to get out of line like that, it's bad for business. And I kind of figure you also didn't like it that they were trying to cut each other out. So you decided to off both of them and just take your stuff back. The fuck, you probably got a grudge against cops going back seventy years or more."
Maldonado nodded sadly. "My mistake was I didn't imagine what a crazy son-of-a-bitch this Murphy was. He was coming to the meet with a box of shit and thought he could just laugh at me afterwards."
"Hell," Starhawk said. "You're old, right, and you own a lot of respectable businesses. He didn't think you had the stones to kill a cop anymore, is all. And he didn't know Mendoza was planning to hijack him and had already contacted your boys for a price on the coke. So he couldn't guess you'd set it up that two crooked cops shot each other."
"We are all very careful," Maldonado said, "and we all make mistakes. So, you come into this as the man Mendoza hired to hijack Murphy. Let me ask you-why do you come to me and talk of the standard commission for returning the snow? You could be on a plane right now, and sell it at street prices somewhere, and nobody the wiser. What does Maldonado have for you?"
"I bought an airplane ticket, first thing this afternoon. Then I started thinking. With Murph and Mendoza dead, I need new friends, and there just aren't that many cops I am that close to. Don, I want you to be my friend."
"The coke is worth at least three hundred fifty grand on the street. Standard commission is thirty-five grand. You are sure you will not later regret losing so much to make a new friend?"
"Don," Starhawk said, "nobody ever regrets making a new friend."
"It is agreeable to me," Maldonado said. "Will you have some more Chianti?"
"Only a little," Starhawk said. "It is bad for the reflexes."
TOKE WITHOUT HASTE
The letter was sent out May 1, 1984, to the White House and all the major media. It said:
May God forgive us. May history judge us charitably.
We have placed tactical nuclear bombs in over 500 locations throughout Unistat. The targets are all enemies of the people: large banks, multinational corporations, government tax offices. We will trigger one of these bombs at noon tomorrow, somewhere in western Unistat, to demonstrate that we are not bluffing.
All the other nuclear bombs will be triggered in succession until our demands are met. If any attempt is made to apprehend and arrest us-any attempt at all- all the remaining bombs will be detonated at once.
We demand:
That President Lousewart immediately confiscate all fortunes above one million dollars…
And so on. POE had come into materialization again- caused by the same historical and neurogenetic forces.
"I think it's a hoax," said President Lousewart, who was really, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart, a.k.a. Hassan i Sabbah X.
"Can we be sure?" asked Mounty Babbit, who was now naught else but a walking automaton, controlled by the quantum information system that had been a Vietnamese Buddhist.
"We can never be sure," said Vice President Squeeze, who used to be Robert Pearson. "This is an absolute piss cutter."
There was a depressed silence.
"How did our karma ever land us here?" asked Hassan i Sabbah X.
Even Fed Xing wasn't sure of the answer to that.
"Well," Hassan said. "Let's distribute the fucking money. This just accelerates what we had in mind all along…"
"We can't do it," Pearson said. "You'd be assassinated before the day is over."
Hassan contemplated.
"We can fucking try," he said.
"There are many mind-states and universes," Ped Xing added serenely. "If we don't succeed here, we will continue elsewhere."
BOOK ONE
The Trick Top Hat
PART ONE
STOIC AND CHRISTIAN EJACULATIONS
If we compare Stoic with Christian ejaculations, we see much.
–william james, Varieties of Religious Experience
AD ASTRA
The majority of Terrans were six-legged, but we are not concerned with them. We are concerned with a tiny minority of domesticated primates who built pyramids and wrote books and eventually achieved Space Migration and entered into the galactic drama.
They were very clever primates-excellent at mimicry and even capable of creative thinking at times.
They never would have escaped from their planet and the boom-and-bust cycles of all life-forms adapted to planetside living if it hadn't been for the H.E.A.D. Revolution.
HEAD means Hedonic Engineering and Development. It consists of learning to use the primate brain for fun and profit.
At the time of our story the HEAD Revolution, after an underground existence of many centuries, included only about 2 percent of the domesticated primates on Terra. The rest of the domesticated primates were still using their brains for misery and failure.
They did not know they were misusing their brains. They thought there was something wrong with the universe.
They called it the Problem of Evil.
Experts on the Problem of Evil were known as theologians. These were very erudite primates, skilled in primate logic, who wrote long books trying to answer the question "Why did God create an imperfect universe?"
"God" was their name for the hypothetical biggest-alpha-male-of-all. Being primates, they could not comprehend how anything could run if there weren't an alpha male in charge of it.
They assumed the universe was imperfect because it was obviously not set up for the convenience of domesticated primates.
The universe was not even designed for the convenience and comfort of the six-legged majority on Terra. The convenience and comfort of planetside species has very little to do with the cosmic drama.
A few of the primates had realized this. They were known as cynics.
Cynics were primates who realized the monotonous life-death cycle of terrestrial life, but were not imaginative enough to conceive of future evolution after longevity and escape velocity had been attained.
Planetary life is cyclical because planets themselves follow cyclical orbits about their mother stars. (See Galactic Encyclopedia, "Larvel Stages of Species Development.")
The six-legged majority on Terra, for instance, followed a life script of four or more stages. In general, the pattern was: (1) the embryonic or egg form; (2) the larval period; (3) the pupal or chrysalis stage; (4) the adult insect. During each stage the biot or biological unit-the so-called individual-passed through a metamorphosis during which it was totally or partially transformed.
The same was true of the domesticated primates. Most of them passed through, and kept neurological circuits characteristic of, the following four stages: (1) imprinting and using the self-nourishing networks of the primate brain-the neonate or infant stage (oral biosurvival consciousness); (2) imprinting and using the emotional-territorial networks of the primate brain-the "toddler" stage (anal status consciousness); (3) imprinting and using the semantic circuits-the verbal or conceptual stage (symbolic rational consciousness); (4) imprinting and using the socio-sexual circuits-the mating or parenting stage (tribal taboo consciousness).