Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  CLUES

  Every string which has one end also has another end.

  —FINAGLE’S FIRST FUNDAMENTAL FINDING

  Clem Cotex had been nosing about the Lincoln Park Zoo for several days and was more puzzled than ever. The facts were undeniable: The zoo had, indeed, purchased over 200 gorillas in the past decade and only two of them were on exhibit; 198 were missing. Any sort of casual questioning of the primate house attendants brought instantly vague answers in a well-rehearsed manner. They were all in on the cover-up. The public was being protected against all knowledge of the inexplicable, the weird, the surrealistic. All part of the usual governmental pretense that human affairs were rationally administered by experts who knew what was really going on. They feared that if people ever discovered that those in power were as confused by this inexplicable universe as those out of power, then the whole charade might collapse.

  There was no Black Hole in the zoo; Cotex was sure of that. All gravity conditions were normal. The gorillas were not falling through a Schwartzchild radius into the universe next door or anything really spooky like that. They were simply teleporting somewhere … maybe back to their homelands in Africa. Although, considering the unpredictability of teleportive currents as documented by Charles Fort—who had recorded cases of snakes landing in Memphis, Tennessee, and coconuts being deposited in Worcester, England—the gorillas might actually be reappearing anywhere.

  Since anything might be a clue in such occult enigmas, Clem had carefully copied all the graffiti in the men’s room at the primate house. It was the usual jumble of disparate and ambiguous signals: “Black P. Stone Run It,” “For a good blow job call 555-1717 and ask for Father James Flanagan,” “Help Prevent Von Neumann’s Catastrophe!,” “Arm the Unemployed,” “Free our four-legged brothers and sisters. A zoo is a child’s heaven and an animal’s hell,” “Save the Whales—Harpoon a Honda,” “Off the Landlords,” “Stamp Out Sizeism.”

  Probably, Cotex thought morosely, there is an important signal in there and I’m just not imaginative enough to see it.

  THE ALTRUIST

  God bless America.

  —LAST WORDS OF G. I. GURDJIEFF

  Everybody who had been at Wildeblood’s party felt compelled to attend Benedict’s funeral, even though none of them enjoyed it. Benny had been one of the funniest writers of his time, at least in the daily press, and it would have been appropriate to send him off with a showing of old Laurel and Hardy films or something equally in his own métier. Primate decorum forbade this. They packed him in with a dull and depressing “religious” ceremony.

  “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” intoned a primate with his collar on backward. Nobody knew what the hell that meant, if anything, but they tried to feel better when they heard it.

  At the time Benny was buried a window washer was at work on the seventeenth floor of the Morgan Guaranty Trust at 23 Wall Street. He was an expert lip-reader and knew more of the secrets of Wall Street than anybody outside the Illuminati. In fact, the second reason he had become a window washer was to get work in the Wall Street district and pick up useful information.

  The main reason he had taken the job would have been even more unnerving to Morgan Guaranty had they known about it. The window washer was a member of Purity of Essence and had already managed to place 333 homemade nuclear weapons on ledges so high nobody but a pigeon was ever likely to see them.

  All of the weapons were set to go off at a signal from the POE computer—another homemade contraption but awesomely efficient. POE was full of science grads who had dropped out of the career game in horror and revulsion at the uses to which science was being put in their universe.

  At this point POE had twenty-eight American cities mined. The window washer hoped that, when push came to shove, POE wouldn’t have to detonate more than one of those cities. He was an altruist, like everybody else in Purity of Essence.

  TAKE WHAT THOU HAST

  Take what thou hast and give it to the poor.

  —ATTRIBUTED TO SOME LONGHAIR COMMIE FREAK

  The letter was sent out May 1, 1984, to the New York Times-News-Post, the Chicago Sun, the Los Angeles Times-Free Press, NBC News, CBS News, the White House, Mae Brussel, the Berkeley Barb, KPFA, ABC News, the London Times, Zodiac News Service, The Christian Science Monitor, the Archdioceses of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and St. Louis, the Church of Scientology, Mark Lane, Paul Krassner, Dick Gregory, Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bad Ass Bugle, the Nihilist Anarchist Horde, Norman Mailer, and 237 miscellaneous other institutions and celebrities. POE wanted to be sure that their message would get out to the general public with the minimum of distortion by the Establishment.

  The letter said:

  May God forgive us. May history judge as charitably.

  We have placed tactical nuclear bombs in over 1,700 locations throughout the United States. The targets are all enemies of the people: large banks, multinational corporations, government facilities. We will trigger one of these bombs at noon tomorrow, somewhere in the eastern United States, to demonstrate that we are not bluffing.

  All of 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 Furbish Lousewart immediately confiscate all fortunes above one million dollars;

  That this money, which we calculate makes a sum of approximately three trillion dollars, be distributed at once to the forty million families, who are, according to the government’s own standards, living below the poverty line, so that each poor family receives $75,000;

  That all government money presently invested in weapons of war and preparations for war be immediately redirected to improving schools, homes, and hospitals in poor neighborhoods, so as to make them fit for human beings;

  That George Washington be removed from the dollar bill and replaced by Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse to remind people forever of the idiocy of worshiping money.

  A final word of warning: We have been working on this project for sixteen years and have the full capacity to do all that we say. The Revolution of Lowered Expectations has been a monopolist’s heaven and a poor people’s hell. We intend to change that.

  POE

  COLLAPSE OF THE STATE VECTOR

  Records can be destroyed if they do not suit the prejudices of ruling cliques, lost if they become incomprehensible, distorted if a copyist wishes to impose a new meaning upon them, misunderstood if we lack the information to interpret them. The past is like a huge library, mostly fiction.

  —HENRY FORD, Neuro-History

  The doorbell rang.

  Josephine Malik said “Shit” quietly but fervently. She was correcting the galleys of the second printing of her Clitoral Politics and interruptions were not welcome.

  Jo approached the door warily. The regular lock, the bolt lock, and the police lock were all in place; the intruder would need an ax to get in if he were one of the 2,000,000 violent criminals among the 20,000,000 citizens of New York in 1984.

  “Who is it?” she shouted through the door.

  “Ukraine.”

  “Who???” she screamed.

  “Hugh Crane,” came the voice, louder. “We met at a Wildeblood party last December….”

  “Go away. I don’t know you and I’m busy.”

  “This is important. The novel we’re in is coming to a horrible conclusion….”

  “You’re nuts. Go away.” Jo turned away from the door and went to the closet for her Saturday Night Special, in case this maniac did have an ax.

  “Listen to me, please, we’ve only got a few minutes,” the voice shouted through the door. “Maybe you can almost remember the name Hagbard Celine. That’s the name I had in the last quantum eigenstate, the last novel, when we worked together….”

  Jo went to the phone. “Give me the police!” she shouted, forgetting that she wasn’t ye
lling through a door anymore.

  It was the last sentence she ever spoke.

  At that moment Manhattan Island became a nuclear furnace.

  President Lousewart, guided by Intelligence Agencies that had collectively listened to enough “private” conversations to be stone-paranoid, had acted within minutes after the POE letter arrived in the White House. The Unistat government would not be blackmailed. Even before TV could broadcast the story of the threat, over 10,000,000 “radicals” and possible “radicals” had been placed under arrest coast to coast. One of them, more or less accidentally, had been Sylvia Goldfarb of POE.

  All 1,700 POE bombs detonated at once. Unistat as an entity ceased to exist. Nihilist Anarchist Hordes roamed what was left of the landscape.

  Twenty-three hundred nuclear missiles, computer-guided to fire if Unistat were nuked, took off at the first blast and decimated Russia. The Beast had been programmed by Intelligence Agencies who were all convinced that any nuclear attack would come from there.

  Twenty-three hundred Russian missiles took off the moment the first Unistat missile entered Russian airspace. They all went to China. The Russian computer had also been programmed by very dogmatic, very inflexible primates; it “knew” that any nuclear attack would come from China.

  Starhawk was coming out of a bar on Geary when Frisco went. He was incinerated before his brain could register that anything was happening.

  Lionel Eacher, long since returned to Contract Law, outlived the blast. He had been on vacation in Upper Michigan and was well armed, since he had been hunting. He survived by hunting and eating other mammals, including formerly domesticated primates, for nearly twenty years.

  Then another formerly domesticated primate, even quicker and slicker, hunted and ate Lionel.

  Markoff Chaney also survived. He was on a Greyhound in Florida, between Miami and Hollywood, when the bombs went off. He took to the Everglades and eventually even found a mate—a Seminole woman who didn’t think he was absurd at all.

  Their tribe increased.

  The tribal stage endured 100,000 years, as it had before.

  Then, suddenly, when environmental conditions were right, genetic programs reasserted themselves. The hive instinct reappeared in the primates. Cities appeared, sin and guilt were reinvented, technology advanced.

  Nuclear energy was rediscovered, and misused again.

  The tribal age endured 12,000,000 years the next time.

  Then, suddenly, when environmental conditions were right, genetic programs reasserted themselves. The hive instinct reappeared in the primates. Cities appeared, sin and guilt were reinvented, technology advanced….

  The six-legged majority knew little and cared less about all this primate activity. They had solved all their social problems three billion years earlier, and saw no need to change. They followed their own DNA cycles, just as monotonously as the primates followed primate cycles.

  PART ONE

  THE UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR

  We doctors know

  a hopeless case when—listen; there’s a hell

  of a good universe next door; let’s go

  —E. E. CUMMINGS, “pity this

  busy monster, manunkind”

  TO CROSS AGAIN

  The influence of the senses have in men overpowered the thought to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid; real and insurmountable…. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the power of the mind. Man is capable of abolishing them both.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Mary Margaret Wildeblood had been born or reborn in November 1983 in Johns Hopkins Hospital. The very first sound she heard was a radio in the next ward playing:

  God rest ye merry gentlemen

  Let nothing you dismay

  Localization was gradually determined: this universe, this galaxy, this solar system, this planet, this hospital. They were sawing off his penis.

  Yes indisputably no doubt about it they were sawing off his penis. Seven dwarfs with evil grins were doing it. Then coming all the way out of the ether, this hospital, this bed, this morning in November 1983, Epicene Wildeblood knew at last who She really was. The radio sang cheerfully:

  Remember Christ our Savior

  Was born upon this day

  SHe was still giddy from the ether, but that would pass; meanwhile the Voice of Dream was still talking, a fussy old professor lecturing: “One quantum jump away the ideal pretence is Real Presence. An S-T transformation. The English language limerick is restricted so that a cross carried up a hill is anisogamous but the essence remains the Body and Blood of the first amoeba. Consider the following example which some consider Donne and others describe as overdone:

  Quoth a merrie old judge named Magoo

  ‘Perversions? Yea, I’ve tried a few

  But the best I e’er balled

  Were Lee Harvey Oswald

  Seven dwarfs and a pink cockatoo!’

  “It doesn’t scan,” Wildeblood protested feebly.

  A gay swish of starched cloth moved queerly and a nurse’s bland blond face appeared looking down at hir. “Anything the matter, dearie?” in a Brooklyn accent.

  “What day is it?”

  “Wednesday. Still Wednesday.” The nurse spoke, as they always do after surgery, as if talking to an idiot.

  The doctor recrossed on his peg leg (but that was slipping back into the dream again).

  “Circumcision is a Jewish conspiracy. He bit it off, one great CHOMP! ! !—and off it came,” Dr. Ahab was ranting. “I am the feet’s lieutenant. Sprechen Sie Joysbrick?”

  A dangling “e” fell past from another book.

  They were opening the curtains to let in sunlight. The white wall was a hospital wall. A hand at his wrist told hir that now her pulse was being taken.

  Epicene Wildeblood awakened again. “I’m Mary Margaret,” he gasped happily, beached on the shore of reality, cast up from the ocean of dream.

  “Yes,” said the real doctor’s voice (his name was Glopberger, not Ahab), “the operation was um 100 percent successful. You are most certainly Mary Margaret now.” He beamed, an artist proud of his work, yet tentative, waiting for the Work’s first live movement.

  Mary Margaret Wildeblood looked about her at the New World. This is Johns Hopkins Hospital. This is 1983. Everything that went before was just a nightmare. I am alive. I am me. I am free.

  “How soon do I get the Curse?” she cried. “When do I become a real woman?” Thinking: the Blood of the Lamb.

  Glopberger’s pink face, agape, was yet another Disney caricature, the waters of unconsciousness calling hir home. Home: back to the stars. And She went, she went, into the great ether drift, into the cosmic void again, from dina shaur to turban bay in a michaelsonmorley regurgitation to the Hawkfouledest Convention in Elveron. Yes a forty-four-year-old male rising like Venus on fours out of the waves but aglow gleaming as in Botticelli: hir Self surprised at this astonishingly female body a really successful crossing and one hand crept as she slept toward the crypt rested there happy yes: it was true. A female body. She snored hoarsely.

  And Dr. Glopberger, like Baron Frankenstein, looked on his work and saw that it was very good. So far.

  MURPHY’S RELIGIOUS

  I still recall vividly the shock I experienced on first encountering this multiworld concept. The idea of 10100 + slightly imperfect copies of oneself all constantly splitting into further copies … is not easy to reconcile with comon sense.

  —BRYCE S. DEWITT “QUANTUM MECHANICS AND REALITY.” Physics Today September, 1970

  They were sitting in a VW Rabbit on Market Street in San Francisco. The marquee across the street still said DEEP THROAT after twelve years. “They never going to change that?” Starhawk asked. “Everybody and his brother been there to see that Linda Lovelace swallow peckers by now. Hell, everybody and his brother been there twice by now.”

  “She could swallow my pecker anytime,” Mendoza said. Mendoza was a cop.


  “I seen a funny one the other day,” Starhawk said, starting to laugh. “In the men’s crapper in the archaeology building. ‘Linda Lovelace for President,’ it said. ‘Let’s have a good-looking cocksucker in the White House.’ College kids.”

  “They’re all a bunch of fags these days,” Mendoza told him seriously. “Fags and dopers. And they call us pigs. Anyway, what were you doing in the archaeology building?”

  “I like to study my people’s history,” Starhawk said. “There a law against that?”

  “The fuck,” Mendoza said, “I don’t care what you do on your spare time. You make out with those college girls? Don’t tell me, I know. You make out like a bandit. You’re the greatest thing come down the pike since Burt Reynolds, you are.”

  Starhawk started to clean his nails with an attachment on his key ring.

  “Tell me about the coke.”

  “Murph owns more guns than the army got, up in Presidio. He’s a real nut on guns. I mean, it’s your ass he catches you. He won’t think twice about it. A police officer catching a burglar in his own house, it’s your ass. You got to understand that.”

  “Dig,” Starhawk said. “It’s always my ass. You think there’s a crib worth knocking over they don’t have guns these days? Christ, there’s never been a better-armed country since we had the Revolution, is what it is. Even little old ladies. Even in Berkeley for Christ’s sake. This is no business for anybody got shaky nerves, these days. College professors, their houses are stacked with enough munitions for Black Panther headquarters. What I don’t understand is how come everybody in the fucking country hasn’t been at least wounded by now. Everybody’s even more crazy-mad than they are shit-scared. It’s like High Noon. You don’t have to tell me, be careful. I wasn’t careful, I’d be one dead Indian.”