When a pattern is set up in time by the activation of an archetype, however, the crucial factor does not seem to be an external agency of any kind but rather an ordering principle that is inherent in the fact that a pattern is being formed.
–ira progoff, Jung, Synchronicity and Human Destiny
Banana Nose Maldonado ate silently. He ate three kinds of cheese and pepperoni and black olives and sliced red peppers and anchovies for antipasto. Then he ate beef fillets in parmigiana and a side of lasagna, drinking occasionally from the Chianti glass. He did not speak until after he had finished the last sip of the wine and pushed back his plate.
"Proceed," he said.
"The food was excellent, don," said Starhawk, pushing back his own plate.
Banana Nose nodded formally, smiling. "Proceed."
"You got a box of sugar today," Starhawk said. "With some cocaine on top. You went to a hell of a lot of trouble to get it. Three guys got dead."
"Imagine that," said Maldonado. "You know a great deal about my private business."
"Two of the guys were supposed to get dead," Starhawk said. "But one of them was a thick Irishman and he didn't die easy. The funny thing is, what with the excitement and all, he got shot once with the wrong gun. He was only supposed to be shot with his partner's gun. It was supposed to look like they shot each other, fighting over the coke."
"Son-of-a-bitch," Maldonado said, softly as a prayer. "They tell me you're a thief. They didn't tell me you're the Invisible Man. What were you doing, riding around in one of my boy's back pockets?"
"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?"