But a few nights later, when he was on top of her and inside her, and chanting in Tibetan, she suddenly thought she saw a kind of light around his head and two horns sprouting on his temple, and then it was like a million balloons bursting inside her and outside her at once, each balloon releasing a twinkle of light, each light a species of orgasm. "Rhoda Chief" ceased to exist. Eternities later, reentering time, she found he was again at the bottom of the bed, head between her legs, licking ferociously. She fainted.
He had a large library dealing with both stage magic and occultism, and Rhoda occasionally browsed in it. The next morning, while he was still asleep, she went back to it and searched in several volumes by Rosenkreuz, Therion, lambacchus, Prinn, Dee, and Kelly. "The Mass of the Holy Ghost" was variously described, but the Rose of Ruby was always identified with water and the first H in JHVH, the H of motherhood. The Cross of Gold had different meanings, too, but was chiefly fire and the J of JHVH, the J of fatherhood. Bringing the J and the H i? together, the wedding of Cross and Rose, produced the manifestation of the Holy Ghost in the form of a eucharist, which was then consumed by the alchemist. My God, she thought, the Cross is his cock and the Rose is my cunt; that's why he goes down on me afterward, as well as just before, "The eucharist," old Prinn's words said blandly, "is both male and female, both living and dead, both fire and water, and yet its creation involves no violation of nature but merely obedience to nature's own laws, together with the proper spiritual attitude."
Professor Nosferatu of Columbia, an old friend of Rhoda's, listened raptly as she recited the words to him. "That's not Tibetan, whatever he told you," he said. He repeated it with correct pronunciation: "IO PAN IO PAN PAN IO PANGENITOR IO PANPHAGE. It's an invocation of the god Pan in classic Greek. 'Io Pan, Io Pan, Pan. Io Pan-All-Creator, Io Pan-All-Devourer.' " He looked at her curi-ously. "You know, I've heard some rather odd rumors about you and him…"
"Whatever you've heard," she said with a faint smile, "is probably true. I want you to give me the name of the best shrink you know. I want somebody to work on my head and help me to stay away from him."
TRADE AIDS
GALACTIC ARCHIVES:
After the RICH Economy had revolutionized the lives and expectations of Unistaters on and off Terra, Eve Hubbard realized that the time was now ripe to abolish poverty entirely. She did this by declaring every citizen a shareholder in the L5 space-cities and distributing National Dividends every year.
Again, Hubbard's political genius was evident. Others who had proposed such a plan in the past (e.g., the engineers C. H. Douglas and R. Buckminster Fuller, the inventor Tom Edison, the semanticist Alfred Korzybski, the physicist Frederic Soddy) had assumed such dividends would have to be "money." This proposal, in that form, always aroused heated opposition from the alpha males of the banking business, who understood well that an expanding money supply would lower the interest rate, seriously threatening their profits.
Hubbard called her National Dividend tickets "trade aids," a term devised by a public relations firm she had commissioned to make the idea palatable to domesticated primates.
Trade aids were like money only in that they could be exchanged for commodities or services. They were unlike money in that they could not be loaned at interest; the bankers kept their monopoly on the interest market and were mollified.
Trade aids were also unlike money in that they could not be hoarded. Each ticket was dated, and lost value at 1 percent per month after the issue date, becoming totally valueless in one hundred months, or eight years and four months. There was thus a built-in incentive to spend the trade aids as soon as possible.
When the first trade aid dividends were distributed, it turned out that even the poorest Unistat citizens had the equivalent of $80,000 for that year, in purchasing power, even though the tickets were not called "money."
Citizens with that much purchasing power have huge demand, in the economic sense of ability to buy. The economy expanded more rapidly than ever, with new businesses springing up continually, both on Terra and in the space-cities.
The rest of Terra was soon copying these innovations- the socialist countries most slowly and grudgingly. By 1995 starvation had been eliminated everywhere-just as had been the goal of the Hunger Project, started by a California primate named Erhard back in the 1970s. By then Hubbard had been out of the White House for six years and busy again at genetics and longevity research. She often said to friends that her whole political career had been merely an experiment in altering the parameters of primate sociobiology.
TO CROSS AGAIN
DECEMBER 24, 1983:
Simon Moon toked at his pipe, pulling the hash deep into his lungs, floating with it.
December 23 had been a hell of a day. Ubu and Knight and the other guys from the FBI had been all over the shop demanding to know why the Beast couldn't tell them any more about the missing scientists and warning ominously that President Lousewart was Personally Concerned and so on and so forth: the usual governmental craperoo. Simon only stayed on the job for the sheer pleasure he got out of working with the Beast, fucking up the government from within. But even that pleasure was wearing thin, and he hopped a suborbital to New York just to be away from everything Washingtonian for the holidays.
He exhaled a fog of cannabis molecules and returned his attention to his favorite bedtime reading, Brown's Laws of Form:
To cross again is not to cross.
It must have been the hash, but suddenly that simple axiomatic statement was fraught with new and urgent meaning. A knight's move on the word processor would switch F to N, the FBI to the NBI, abolishing Knightness in the process.
Only the quantum inseparability principle would explain why Furbish Lousewart went away in the same rotation.
Simon found that he had wandered or teleported from the bedroom to the toilet and was staring in absorption at the sink. The two handles, one saying H and the other C, seemed to have enormous Cabalistic meaning, connected, perhaps, with the fact that Joe Malik had been Jo Malik before the collapse of the state vector.
Of course, out-of-the-book experiences are not yet recognized by orthodox science. The parapsychologists who dare to speculate about such things are ritually torn asunder and dismembered by Marvin Gardens in the back pages of the Scientific American. Still, this does not discourage Simon Moon, who is, after all, a close associate of the Beast and hip to the programmer's trade secret that all that exists is information: everything else is mammalian sense-impression and thus hallucinatory. Besides, Simon is doing it right now: and can see in one instant, in the twinkling of an eye, the total contents of the novel, a miracle of microminiaturization in the frontal lobes, as the metaprogramming circuit clicks into action.
The novel was called The Universe Next Door. It existed-was bought and sold and loaned-in a super-continuum called the United States of America, which was Unistat enlarged into other dimensions.
Everything in the novel was inevitable, as everything in the supercontinuum containing the novel was inevitable.
Everything that happened in Unistat had to happen, as everything in the United States of America had to happen.
That which was above was precisely reflected in that which was below.
To cross again was not to cross.
"So all right," Joe Malik said, staring at Simon through a triangle, "are you just trying to scare me to death or do you have a message for me?"