The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Hagbard lowered his eyes for a second and gave a Sicilian shrug. "O oi che siete in picdoletta barca," he said softly, and bowed. "I'm still in charge of nautical and technical matters," he announced, "but Miss Portinari now succeeds me as episkopos of the Leif Erikson cabal. Anyone with lingering spiritual or psychological problems, take them to her." He lunged across the room, hugged the girl, laughed with her happily for a moment and placed his golden apple ring on her finger. "Now I don't have to meditate every day," he shouted joyously, "and I'll have more time for some thinking."

In the next two days, as the Leif Erikson

slowly crossed the Sea of Valusia and approached the Danube, George discovered that Hagbard had, indeed, put all his mystical trappings behind him. He spoke only of technical matters concerning the submarine, or other mundane subjects, and was sublimely unconcerned with the role-playing, role-changing and other mind-blowing tactics that had previously made up his persona. What emerged- the new Hagbard, or the old Hagbard of days before his adoption of guru-hood- was a tough, pragmatic, middle-aged engineer, with wide intelligence and interests, an overwhelming kindness and generosity, and many small symptoms of nervousness, anxiety and overwork. But mostly he seemed happy, and George realized that the euphoria derived from his having dropped an enormous burden.

Miss Portinari, meanwhile, had lost the self-effacing quality that made her so eminently forgettable before, and, from the moment Hagbard passed her the ring, she was as remote and gnomic as an Etruscan sybil. George, in fact, found that he was a little afraid of her- an annoying sensation, since he thought he had transcended fear when he found that the Robot was, left to itself, neither cowardly nor homicidal.

George tried to discuss his feelings with Hagbard once, when they happened to be seated together at dinner on April 28. "I don't know where my head is at anymore," he said tentatively.

"Well, in the immortal words of Marx, putta your hat on your neck, then," Hagbard grinned.

"No, seriously," George murmured as Hagbard hacked at a steak. "I don't feel really awakened or enlightened or whatever. I feel like K. in The Castle:

I've seen it once, but I don't know how to get back there."

"Why do you want to get back?" Hagbard asked. "I'm damned glad to be out of it all. It's harder work than coal mining." He munched placidly, obviously bored by the direction of the conversation.

"That's not true," George protested. "Part of you is still there, and always will be. You've just given up being a guide for others."

"I'm trying to give up," Hagbard said pointedly. "Some people seem to be trying to reenlist me. Sorry. I'm not a German shepherd or a draftee. Non serviam,

George."

George fiddled with his own steak for a minute, then tried another approach. "What was that Italian phrase you used, just before you gave your ring to Miss Por-tinari?"

"I couldn't think of anything else to say," Hagbard explained, embarrassed. "So, as usual with me, I got arty and pretentious. Dante addresses his readers, in the First Canto of the Paradiso, 'O voi che siete in pic-cloletta barca'- roughly, Oh, you who are sailing in a very small boat astern of me. He meant that the readers, not having had the Vision, couldn't really understand his words. I turned it around, 'O oi che siete in piccioletta barca,' admitting I was behind her in understanding. I should get the Ezra Pound Award for hiding emotion in tangled erudition. That's why I'm glad to give up the guru gig. I never was much better than second-rate at it."

"Well, I'm still way astern of you..

." George began.

"Look," Hagbard growled. "I'm a tired engineer at the end of a long day. Can't we talk about something less taxing to my depleted brain? What do you think of the economic system I outline in the second part of Never Whistle While You're Pissing? I've decided to start calling it techno-anarchism; do you think that's more clear at first sight than anarcho-capitalism?"

And George found himself, frustrated, engaged in a long discussion of non-interest-bearing currencies, land stewardship replacing land ownership, the inability of monopoly capitalism to adjust to abundance, and other, matters which would have interested him a week ago but now were very unimportant compared to the question which Zen masters phrased as "getting the goose out of the bottle without breaking the glass"- or specifically, getting George Dorn out of "George Dorn" without destroying GEORGE DORN.

That night, Mavis came again to his bed, and George said again, "No. Not until you love me the way I love you."

"You're turning into a stiff-necked prig," Mavis said. "Don't try to walk before you can crawl."