Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  Dr. Dashwood could not abide inexactitude or slovenliness in any human activity. “A thing worth doing,” he would explain to his subordinates, “is worth doing right.” He said this often, and malicious members of the staff said it even more often, when he was out of earshot, with a tone and a facial expression that were caricatures of his own.

  With a smile on his lips and a glint in his eye, Frank Dashwood buzzed Ms. Karrige. “What’s first for today?” he asked cheerfully.

  The Jabberwock was growing: The key was no key….

  FUNNY VALENTINE

  Megalithic monuments were certainly not places of worship but places of refuge for people fleeing the advance of mud.

  —FURBISH LOUSEWART V, Unsafe Wherever You Go

  While Dr. Dashwood was pressing his buzzer in San Francisco, Starhawk was carefully screwing two mountain climber’s hooks into a hill across the bay in Oakland. The first rope was wrapped around his waist outside the trousers, ran through a pulley, and came back to his hand. The second rope circled his chest, ran through the second pulley, and was secured to a tree. He began lowering himself down through the redwoods.

  At first there was no visibility at ground level, but as he descended the roof of Murphy’s house a bit of yard came into view. None of the neighboring houses was visible at all.

  Approaching Murphy’s roof, Starhawk slowed and then stopped his descent. In midair he turned, every muscle straining, and continued his descent headfirst, legs tightly together, the style of a professional highdiver. A small film of perspiration formed around his lips. He was totally silent.

  Twice, redwood branches almost tangled his ropes. He remained totally silent while disengaging.

  Finally, he gripped the roof edge with his left hand, let out more slack with his right, and lowered himself until he was looking in the corner of a window upside down. It was the bedroom. Murphy wasn’t there. The bed was unmade.

  Starhawk raised himself, swung, and descended again to inspect another window. The living room. Murphy was sitting in a red plush chair, his face expressionless. He was listening to music on the stereo. A shotgun leaned against the wall behind him.

  Very slowly, Starhawk raised himself again and swung to the next window. In five minutes, totally silent, he was sure that there was nobody in any of the other rooms.

  He slowly raised himself again and found a perch in a redwood that commanded a view of the front yard and doorway. He waited.

  The music from the stereo drifted up to him. Peggy Lee was singing “My Funny Valentine.”

  After waiting forty-five minutes, Starhawk descended again. Murphy was no longer in the living room. The shotgun was missing also.

  “The fuck?” Starhawk muttered.

  He swung carefully over to the bedroom window. The shotgun rested against the wall beside the closet.

  Murphy came out of the closet and picked up the shotgun again. Careful man, that Murphy; never go anywhere without your shotgun when you’re holding maybe half a million in hot snow.

  Murphy looked quite happy now. He looked like the happiest man Starhawk had ever seen.

  Starhawk returned to his perch in the redwood tree. Murphy had obviously taken a snort of the coke and was probably feeling like Luke Skywalker heading for the Death Star. Starhawk waited silently. It was good to know where the cocaine was.

  A few minutes later a squirrel came along an overhead branch and almost walked over Starhawk’s rope. He stopped, frozen: unable to believe that a human being was way up here in the tree.

  Starhawk and the squirrel stared at each other, both immobile. Then the squirrel ran.

  Starhawk smiled. He went on waiting, quietly.

  FIRST MAMMAL-ROBOT DYAD

  Dr. Dashwood buzzed Ms. Karrige. “What’s first for today?” he asked cheerfully, eager to plunge directly back into the thick of things, as was typical of him on Monday mornings.

  “The uh colored gentleman from New York,” came the tinny voice on the intercom.

  “Send him right in!” Frank said eagerly.

  Robert Pearson was dressed in his “dealing with the straight establishment” clothes, which meant that he looked like the black equivalent of a Mafia don moving in on a legit corporation. You had to look twice to realize that he was too resplendent to appear really conservative.

  “You really have the um merchandise?” Dr. Dashwood asked.

  “I wouldn’t waste your time otherwise,” Pearson said carefully.

  “And it’s not flaccid? I can get them in flaccid state from Johns Hopkins’s sex-change department, by the gross. This must be totally erect, and I can’t imagine how you managed that….”

  Pearson removed a package from his briefcase. “See for yourself,” he said.

  Dr. Dashwood spent several minutes examining the ghoulish trophy. Pearson sat back and lit up a black Sherman cigarette. He was wondering just how surprised Dashwood would be if he mentioned his own long-ago Ph.D. or his career as lead guitarist with Clark Kent and his Supermen. He was just another black gangster as far as Dashwood knew or cared.

  “It’s real,” Dr. Dashwood said finally. “A beautiful specimen,” he added with total scientific detachment. Then he looked directly at Pearson with unblinking curiosity. “You either have a friend with a truly desperate need for money or an enemy who now knows what it means to rouse your anger,” he commented mildly.

  The haggling over money began at that point. Pearson left on the noon flight to New York, bearing $10,000, which later found its way to Afghanistan and came back in the form of bricks of pure hashish.

  Dr. Dashwood, meanwhile, was in m.o.q.—the multiple-orgasm-quotient laboratory—making certain technical adjustments on the ACE equipment. ACE—for artificial coital equipment—had been devised by the Masters-Johnson team and allowed a plastic imitation penis, containing microphotographic devices, to stimulate the inside of a vagina while obtaining clear photographic evidence of the actual physiological changes occurring therein. Orgasm Research had used the same model in their investigation of m.o.q.—the endeavor to find out precisely how many orgasms a multiply orgasmic woman could actually have without untoward side effects. It was Dashwood’s conviction that, the physiological data being already determined, a real penis was more practical now; but a year-long search for the once-famous Cuban Superman had failed to locate the stalwart stud. (“Those bloody puritanical Commies have probably rehabilitated him into more socially useful work,” Dashwood concluded mournfully.)

  Now at last with the relic of Wildeblood’s quantum jump across the gender gap attached to ACE, Dashwood had the ideal scientific instrument to measure m.o.q.

  A subject had been obtained via ads placed in underground newspapers throughout the state of California. (“What do Easterners know about fancy fucking?” Dashwood asked, ruling out everybody on the other side of the Rockies. All that part of the country, he firmly believed, was a puritan’s heaven and a hedonist’s hell.) The ad said bluntly:

  SEXPOT WANTED

  We are not making porny movies. We are not kinks or creeps. This is a serious scientific project. If you think you qualify, and would like to earn $1,000, write Box 56, San Francisco, in strict confidence.

  Weeding out unlikely prospects had been time-consuming and somewhat wearying, although a few had set some interesting records with the old plastic ACE apparatus. The subject selected to have the trial run on the new reincarnated ACE was a Ms. Rhoda Chief, vocalist with a rock group called the Civic Monster. Known to critics as the best heavy rock singer since Janis Joplin, Rhoda was originally renowned back in the sixties for her own curious mutation of old-fashioned Dixieland “scat singing”; what few realized was that her riffs were not mere Jabberwocky but actually fragments of the Enochian Keys used by Dr. John Dee, Mr. Aleister Crowley, and other magicians. People who came out of Civic Monster concerts seeing auras, hearing strange voices, catching odd fugitive glimpses into fairyland and Oz, or seeing the djinns gathered about the throne of Allah, attributed
this to the heavy marijuana fumes always circulating in the air at rock concerts. What Rhoda herself saw during those moments was a secret between herself and her occasional lover in that decade, the controversial stage magician Cagliostro the Great.

  Rhoda had gained another reputation in the 1970s: “That chick gives head better than anybody in show biz,” it was often said in High Society. But this rumor had not reached the aseptic scientific world in which Dr. Dashwood moved.

  Twirling his dapper bow tie debonairly, Francis Dashwood, physician and scientist, strode down the hall to Laboratory Three.

  Rhoda Chief, already nude but with a single sheet demurely spread over her full and obviously still-glorious body, smiled brightly as she saw the doctor.

  “Where’s ACE?” she asked cheerfully.

  “We’ve been making some improvements,” Dashwood said with professional unction. “You might find today’s research a distinct improvement over the test runs last week.”

  The sheet slipped a bit, revealing several inches of round, tense breast. “You mean a bigger-size gizmo on it? I already been through the Errol Flynn, the Primo Carnera, and the King Kong.” These were technical slang for various models of robot dildo.

  What a fantastic piece of hot lustful woman she was, Frank thought irrelevantly. Despite his scientific attitude, he felt himself secretly longing for the moments ahead when the sheet would finally be swept aside to reveal that incredible body, which had appeared in his dreams twice over the weekend. With an effort, he resumed his professional manner.

  “No,” he said quietly. “No larger sizes. The King Kong is the biggest we have in stock. Today is something entirely new. We are using the real thing—but still attached to the ACE machine, so you can control it as always, calibrating speed and depth of thrust and so forth to your own special requirements. Ah, here it comes now.”

  A technician wheeled in the new improved ACE apparatus.

  Rhoda sat up, staring in frank astonishment—and the sheet slipped another inch, revealing that gorgeous right nipple, like a chocolate gumdrop, Frank thought. Not for the first time, he cursed the professional ethics which would ruin his career if he ever touched one of his experimental subjects.

  The technician, who always insisted on being called “Jonesy” or “R.N.”—his real name was Richard Nixon Jones, but he kept that a careful secret, and never sent Mother’s Day cards—wheeled the ACE over to the bed and affixed it at the proper angle. It looked like a science-fiction version of the Great God Baphomet. The pink phallus seemed extra-erotic amid the sculpted white plastic of the machine, dangling a few inches above the Venusian bush slightly visible through the thin white sheet. “All set,” Jonesy said stiffly, and retreated to the door. He had never quite gotten over his initial embarrassment at working for Orgasm Research.

  Rhoda Chief reached out a tentative hand and felt Ulysses hovering above her midsection. There was a pause. Dashwood watched her hand moving along the pink shaft. In imagination he vividly felt the same hand groping with his trousers. I am a professional, he reminded himself sternly.

  “Well,” he said, “anytime you’re ready.”

  “It’s for science,” Rhoda said hoarsely.

  “That’s right. For science.”

  “Take the sheet off me,” she whispered.

  “I can’t do that,” Frank said, straining to avoid a break in his voice, his eyes on the crotch beneath the sheets.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I forgot.”

  There was another pause.

  “For science,” he said gently.

  “For science,” she agreed. Slowly she pushed down the sheet, revealing those globes that had twice tormented his sleep. She must be at least a forty-two, he thought, and who ever saw such enormous nipples before? Then, with more determination, she pushed the rest of the sheet off the bed in one quick motion. She was as sweet a sight as dawn itself.

  Dr. Dashwood thought fleetingly of how Fourier series combine to produce, on occasion, perfect sine waves, valley and crest, valley and crest, in a harmony that was like the signature of intelligence and grace. A contemporary pop novelist might say, “She had a figure that would make the Pope kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” Rhoda Chief, one of the trillions of multicellular bioesthetic models worked out by the DNA during its three and a half billion years’ design work on this planet, was only five feet two inches tall, but in that space were the breasts of Babylonian goddesses, the trim waist of a Petty Girl, the pubic bush that Titian strove so hard to paint, the legs of Venus Kallipygios. Dr. Dashwood, who sought always to uncover significant form (and did not know that Clive Bell had once defined art in those two words), responded both cortically and phallically. Were it not for his scientific discipline, he would have knelt in worship, to present her the Pentecostal Gift of Tongues.

  “Um you can use it on the clitoris first, gently, to lubricate yourself,” he said, feeling like a ninny.

  “I’m lubricated already,” Rhoda said in a strangled voice, and moved the handle which spun the wheel which thrust Ulysses into the house where love lived. Her eyes, Frank noted, were still open for a second, but completely out of focus. Then she closed them and began pulling the handle rhythmically.

  Frank began jotting rapidly. “Nipples fully erect at twenty-three seconds. Sex-flush on breasts and neck at thirty seconds. Subject says ‘Jesus’ quite clearly at thirty-six seconds …”

  Ulysses, as the scientist was writing, was creating a neurological uproar in Ms. Rhoda Chief, the mammalian study unit in the first robot-mammal sexual dyad. As the rejected stone in Wildeblood’s cathedral became the cornerstone in Rhoda’s consciousness, she felt as if she were floating and allowed her left hand to run down her body, over her breasts, down over her belly into the garden of Nuit. Rhythmically, in time with the hot, fast thrusting motion of the shaft of Priapus, she rubbed her bush, while the other hand slowly increased the thrusting motion. In her mind’s eye she was simultaneously enjoying a second penis, in her mouth. Not all witches are cocksuckers, but all cocksuckers are witches (whether they know it or not); Rhoda knew it. Her reputation for “eating Peter like no chick since Cleopatra” was not unconnected with the versatility of her singing and other personality traits. Then ACE was talking, in the gentle, slightly Gay tones of HAL, the whacked-out computer in 2001: “To the center of the galaxy,” he was saying. “This is the center of space-time, and it is also the center of your womb, darling Rhoda.” His soft purr went on, as he thrust deeper into her. “It is way, way out and it is also way, way in. You can only enter this mystery on vibes of sheer ecstasy, because all matter at a lower vibratory rate gets destroyed in the Black Hole. So, in order to navigate this dangerous crossing, I must fuck you even more deeply, my darling.”

  “Oh, do it, ACE, do it to me good,” she murmured. “I want to see the center of the galaxy.”

  “There, there,” he purred, “you’ll see the center of the galaxy when your pretty little cunt gets hot enough.”

  “Take me,” she moaned, “take me to the center of space-time.” And deep, deep into the cosmic vaginal barrel and deep, deep into the spiral of her moist galaxy, ACE piloted her. Slow permutations, like the growth of crystals, her sensations were hardly contaminated any longer by thought or vision; deep, deep they went, down into a cavern of strange floral energies, each petal shape tingling with the languid joy-dance in the petals of her own warm pussy (happiness is a warm pussy, she remembered), the shaft of the actual ACE machine digging deeper and deeper into the starry dynamo. “Oh, ACE, oh, ACE, you fuck so divinely,” she gasped.

  “It’s the only way to travel,” he crooned electronically.

  “Oh, keep fucking me. Keep fucking me. Please, please … fuck the universe, fuck every atom, turn the cosmic key in the galactic Black Hole, fuck and fuck and fuck, my God, my Baphomet, fuck forever, fuck the flowers and the starlight and thunder and rain. Fuck Heaven and Hell too.”

  Dr. Dashwood’s face had a curious, ashy-white col
or. He wanted to leap upon the bed, throw the ACE machine to the floor, and take her. His erection was pulsating and his vision was red with pain and need. “Fuck the AMA,” he muttered thickly, lurching forward.

  Just then the phone rang.

  SURPRISE PARTY

  A car stopped about a hundred yards down the road from Murphy’s house. Starhawk quickly began untying his ropes, listening intently. In a few moments he heard them: two or three men coming through the woods. They were very silent for white men.

  Starhawk, free of the ropes, began to move across the trees. The men stopped. Starhawk waited. They still didn’t stir. Starhawk moved again, without a sound. The men were still unmoving. He closed in on them, remaining always about thirty feet above the ground, until he found them.

  Three men. Sitting quietly. Two of them smoking. Waiting.

  Starhawk moved back toward the house, always testing each branch carefully before thrusting it.

  Two mourning doves began to sing a sad little duet.

  Starhawk waited, ten feet above the roof, hidden in the redwood. The three men in the woods waited.

  Inside the house, the phone rang. The men in the woods, who couldn’t possibly have heard it, began moving again.

  Starhawk smiled for the second time that day, and glanced at his watch. It was exactly half past ten. Murphy, on the phone, was probably insisting on a meet in downtown Oakland, some congested street corner he had already picked, where a double cross would be too risky for all parties. Careful man, that Murph. He’d come out the door, with the coke under his arm, thinking how careful he was, and the surprise party would be waiting in the bushes with their guns.

  Starhawk moved quickly to a new perch. Carefully, he pulled up his trouser leg, tore the adhesive tape, and took a pistol from his calf. He was not smiling now.