She also learned what alchemy was all about. "I thought that was all superstition," she said once, pointing at his shelves of old books on the transmutation of elements, the Mass of the Holy Ghost, the Cabala, and the elixir of life.
"We do it almost every night." He smiled. "You have the Cup and I have the Sword. Solve et coagula, divide and unite-that's why I have to go down on you again at the end. The mystic number 210-that means us two becoming one in the peak and the falling into the void. You've got the Triangle and I cause the physical manifestation within it."
"You mean it's all a code? Why did they have to hide it?"
"Those who didn't got burned at the stake," he said. "Read about the witches and the Knights Templar sometime."
He also began teaching her the Tarot. "Now, the Fool corresponds to aleph in Kabala, the ox, or bull-god Dionysus. But aleph is the path from Keser to Chokmah, and, therefore, the Holy Ghost or semen. The Magus is beth, the house or temple-that is, the path from Keser to Binah, the womb…"
"Do you really think you're going to live forever?" she asked him once.
"If not," he said, "I'll die trying."
WISE GUYS AND NEBBISHES
When Simon Moon was appointed Chief of the Computer Section at GWB-666, he immediately junked all the personnel tests then in use and replaced them with a one-question test of his own devising based on the Vlad Enigma. Applicants were simply told the story of Vlad and the monks by an interviewer and asked which monk Vlad impaled. Those who said Vlad impaled the lying flatterer were classified as nebbishes by Simon; they were the kind of fools who still, despite all evidence to the contrary, regarded government and those in authority as honest and just. They would tell the truth to superiors. They were hired at once. "An office full of Eichmanns and Galleys," Simon said proudly. "Not one of them will ever question an order or ask an embarrassing question." He could program endless anarchy, and they would never suspect it, because he was above them in the pack hierarchy.
Those who said Vlad impaled the honest monk, on the other hand, were rejected for employment at GWB. Simon called them the Wise Guys and secretly arranged for a recruiter from the Discordian Society to contact them later. They didn't believe a damned thing government said or did, had heretical opinions on dozens of subjects, and usually smoked dope. They emphatically did not belong in a bureaucracy.
Sometimes Simon called the nebbishes Homo neophobia and the wise guys Homo neophilia.
But that was in another novel. Simon didn't even know if he was still working with the Beast in this novel.
He was becoming identified with the form.
Some things remained constant under the transformation of the Knight move-Marvin Gardens still had his paranoia and his Vlad the Barbarian books, the missing scientists were still missing, Simon was still a mathematician (Mary Margaret had said so, at the party, even though he was only dimly there this time around).
But some things had altered considerably-Josephine Malik was Joseph Malik, F.D.R. Stuart was an editor instead of a revolutionary, Hubbard was President instead of Lousewart.
But all that was trivial. Simon got out his pen and began jotting, in the margins of Laws of Form, the important things he had learned in his out-of-book experience:
1. A novel, or a universe, is a Whole System.
2. Who we are, and what we do, depends on which novel or universe we are in. Every part is a function of the Whole.
3. It is very hard to remember the whole novel or universe because our horns won't fit the
Simon stared at the page, losing the meaning of Mooning, forgetting the question itself as attention narrowed to this single page, this paragraph, this hotel room in New York on the morning of December 24, 1983, barely able to remember even a few pages back or a few pages ahead.
The window closed. The key was no key.
HAVEN'T YOU HEARD?
Man's inexorable though hardly remorseless drive to divinity is taking new, non-institutionalized forms. This comes down to the simplest of propositions: the species must solve the problem of death very soon, blow itself up, or blow its mind.
–alan harrington, The Immortalist
When Norma became pregnant Cagliostro turned into the stereotype of an ideal husband, canceling bookings to be with her, joyously supporting her decision to employ natural childbirth, teaching her yoga to supplement the Lamaze conditioning techniques employed by her obstetrician. He filled her room with flowers-and with photographs of the moon. (Some of his occult studies were involved here, she realized.)
One night the phone rang, and when Crane answered it Epicene Wildeblood purred, "I'm in Hollywood for a week and I guessed you might want to see me."
"You guessed wrong," Crane said. "Sorry. New trip this year."
Norma's labor began prematurely, and the doctor quickly discovered that the baby was in the breech position. After a few hours he realized this childbirth could never be natural. She accepted the ether and he performed a Caesarean, only to find the infant, in turning, had strangled on its umbilical cord.
"Oh, God," she said when she awoke and the doctor told her. "Oh, what a lousy God to make a world like this."
Cagliostro was caught by a gaggle of reporters coming out of the hospital. "How do you feel?" was the first question.
"How the hell do you think I feel?"
"Where will the service be held?"
"There will be no religious service!" Cagliostro shouted, hopping into a cab. "Haven't you fools heard yet?-God is dead!" It made headlines, and inspired editorials. One editorial-"Bereavement Is No Excuse for Blasphemy - came to the attention of a fourteen-year-old boy, John Disk, who was tormented by desires which his priests told him were evil.
When Cagliostro returned to the clubs his act had changed considerably. The mildly satirical patter between escapes had become bitingly mordant-"He's a new Lenny Bruce!"-and entirely centered around his declared philosophy of anarchism and atheism. The escapes themselves changed each night, because he explained them and showed how they were done as the climax of every performance.
"Now you know how I fooled you," he would say. "Try to figure out on your own how your congressmen and clergymen fool you. There is no restraint that isn't self-imposed: you are all absolutely free."
The evening after the newspapers broke the story that he and Norma had joined Joan Baez in refusing to pay taxes, a drunk began heckling him during his act: "Why don't you go back to Russia, you Commie dope fiend!" That sort of thing.
"No man living hates socialism more than me," Cagliostro said intensely.
He and Norma were busted for possession of acid a few weeks later. "This is hard to fix," his lawyer told him. "You're too notorious now. The only chance I see is for you to vow to reform, lament the error of your ways, and promise to go on a lecture tour speaking to teenagers about the evils of drugs. Then maybe I can get you a minimum sentence. Maybe." Hugh's old friend, the Boston psychologist, was in exile in Nepal, having fled a thirty-year sentence in Texas; political offenders in general were having a rough time in the United States. "I'll think about it," he said.
The very next week he led the show-biz contingent among the protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention. A photograph of him being tear-gassed outside the Chicago Hilton is still reprinted whenever an article about him appears.