Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  Ms. Gebloomencraft, the only daughter of the most defiant and unrepentant Nuremburg war criminal, had been the holy terror of the international jet set ever since she reached puberty in the 1960s. Imagine the mind of Markoff Chaney in the body of Raquel Welch; good, you’ve got dear Eva. It was she who had spiked the punch with aphrodisiac PCPA at the Spanish embassy in London, precipitating an orgy and several subsequent suicides among members of Opus Dei. She and she alone who smuggled Norman Mailer in drag to a top-secret strategy meeting of the Radical Lesbians. She again who hired the best freelance electronics experts to obtain tape recordings of J. Edgar Hoover’s boudoir adventures, and then sent them to Rev. Martin Luther King. (That gallant naïf, alas, destroyed them.)

  Eva saw the possibilities of the Wildeblood relic as soon as the columnist broached the matter.

  “Hot shit,” she said, eyes dancing.

  BAD FOR BUSINESS

  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 Ped 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 lea
rning 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?”

  “God” was their name for the hypothetical biggest-alpha-male-of-all. Being primates, they could not comprehend how anything could run if there weren’t an alpha male in charge of it.

  They assumed the universe was imperfect because it was obviously not set up for the convenience of domesticated primates.

  The universe was not even designed for the convenience and comfort of the six-legged majority on Terra. The convenience and comfort of planetside species has very little to do with the cosmic drama.

  A few of the primates had realized this. They were known as cynics.

  Cynics were primates who realized the monotonous life-death cycle of terrestrial life, but were not imaginative enough to conceive of future evolution after longevity and escape velocity had been attained.

  Planetary life is cyclical because planets themselves follow cyclical orbits about their mother stars. (See Galactic Encyclopedia, “Larvel Stages of Species Development.”)

  The six-legged majority on Terra, for instance, followed a life script of four or more stages. In general, the pattern was: (1) the embryonic or egg form; (2) the larval period; (3) the pupal or chrysalis stage; (4) the adult insect. During each stage the biot or biological unit—the so-called individual—passed through a metamorphosis during which it was totally or partially transformed.

  The same was true of the domesticated primates. Most of them passed through, and kept neurological circuits characteristic of, the following four stages: (1) imprinting and using the self-nourishing networks of the primate brain—the neonate or infant stage (oral biosurvival consciousness); (2) imprinting and using the emotional-territorial networks of the primate brain—the “toddler” stage (anal status consciousness); (3) imprinting and using the semantic circuits—the verbal or conceptual stage (symbolic rational consciousness); (4) imprinting and using the socio-sexual circuits—the mating or parenting stage (tribal taboo consciousness).

  It was all very mechanical—but that’s the way planetside life is.

  PRETTY LITTLE BIRDIES

  December 1, 1983:

  Benny “Eggs” Benedict, plump, smallish, and balding, a popular columnist for the New York* News-Times, sat down to compose his daily essay. According to his usual procedure, he breathed deeply, relaxed every muscle, and gradually forced all verbalization in his brain to stop. When he had reached the Void he waited to see what would float up to fill the vacuum. What surfaced was:

  Pretty little birdies

  Picking in the turdies

  Benny felt a rush of nostalgia. The jingle had been popular in Brooklyn when he was a schoolboy in the antediluvian era of the 1930s. Back then, in the Dark Ages of Roosevelt II, many Brooklyn peddlers still had horse-drawn carts, and the horses, as is common with their species, left piles of horse shit in the streets as they went about their itineraries. Sparrows would peck in these steaming piles of dung for undigested oats, and a Brooklyn child would exclaim, on seeing this:

  “Pretty little birdies

  Picking in the turdies!”

  To which another child would usually reply:

  “He’s a poet

  Though his looks don’t show it!”

  Benny reflected that this little bit of kidlore had stuck in his memory for nearly half a century and that it must therefore contain some profound Meaning. He began pounding the Mac Plus, offering the birdie-turdie poemlet as a perfect example of an American haiku—the juxtaposition of two images, without comment by the author, in a way that suggested far more than it actually said.

  “Birds,” Benny wrote, “are traditional symbols of beauty, from Bacon’s nightingales to Keats’s skylark, throughout our whole poetic tradition. Horse manure, on the other hand, is regarded with revulsion and loathing. Yet the sparrows, indifferent to human standards, blithely pick in the manure, seeking the food they know is there. The poem is telling us that human likes and dislikes are arbitrary, squinty-eyed, chauvinistic, and irrelevant to nature’s own grand design strategy.”

  Benny went on to assert that he had only been able to see this profundity in the jingle now, after he had spent six months meditating at the Manhattan Zen Center. “This rhyme is the Essence of Zen,” he concluded.

  It was probably the least successful column Benny ever wrote. Virtually nobody understood it and everybody was bored by it. Some readers even wrote protesting letters complaining that the column had been in questionable taste.

  Benny was depressed by this reaction. He felt it had been a stroke of genius on his part to rescue from oblivion a genuine American haiku; but even more than that, writing the column had triggered a vast stream of recollections about 1930s Brooklyn which gave him a renewed sense of Roots he had hoped to share. Why, how many still alive could remember the procedure when the meter man from Monopolated Edison appeared in a Brooklyn neighborhood in those days? The kids were dispatched as runners, racing from house to house, shouting “Mon Ed! Mon Ed!” Everybody would then remove the bags of salt which they kept over the electric meters to deflect the readings downward and thereby lower the electric bill.

  It seemed like only yesterday that Benny himself had raced from house to house shouting, “Mon Ed! Mon Ed!” And people had rushed to move the bags of salt to closets where the meter man wouldn’t see them. Benny hadn’t thought of those days in more than four decades, yet they lived on in Memory Storage and could be activated again by something as simple as the jingle about the pretty little birdies. And Benny’s whole attitude toward Mon Edison had been shaped by those experiences; he still regarded the “public” utility with a mixture of fear and loathing.

  As a student of Zen, Benny knew that such negative emotions were bad for the nervous system and he often tried to regard Mon Ed without bias. It was impossible. He had learned to forgive Hitler, Stalin, even Nixon, but Mon Edison was still so charged with emotion that he could not think of it without his blood pressure rising. Besides, they had just raised their rates again in October. At the memory of that, Benny’s Zen crumbled entirely.

  “Public utilities are a monopolist’s heaven and a consumer’s hell,” he growled, knowing he was not yet a Buddha.

  But then he cheered up as another bit of 1930s kidlore came back to him. It was a silly ritual, really, but it used to keep them amused, even hilarious, back in sixth grade. It would begin with somebody asking, “Who shit in the sink?”

  “You shit!” another would reply.

  “Bullshit,” the first would riposte.

  “Who shit?” a third would then ask.

  “Frank shit,” somebody would answer.

  “Bullshit,” Frank would object.

  “Who shit?”

  “Joe shit,” Frank would say, getting Joe into the game.

  “Bullshit,” Joe would pay promptly.

  And so it would go: “Who shit?” “Pete shit.” “Bullshit!” “Who shit?” “Jerry shit.” “Bullshit!” … And on, and on, until everybody was bored—which among schoolboys might take quite a long time.

  Benny was so overwhelmed with nostalgia that he decided to go visit his mother at the Brooklyn Senior Citizens’ Home, even though the old lady had been a bit neurotic ever since she was knocked on her ass by a pursesnatcher three years ago on July 23, 1981.

  *Terran Archives 2803: New York was a city-state or island in the midwestern part of the Unistat.
It seems to have been a center of religious worship, and many came there to walk about, probably in deep meditation, within an enormous female statue, the goddess of these primitives. Various authorities identify this divinity as Columbia, Marilyn Monroe, Liberty, or Mother Fucker—all of these being names widely recorded in Unistat glyphs. Perhaps her true name will never be known.

  AMERICAN HAIKU

  The only one in New York who really grokked Benny Benedict’s column about the pretty little birdies was Justin Case, a mild, fortyish man who looked Gay but wasn’t. Case wrote excruciatingly intelligent music criticism. Since he read about this example of American folk haiku while very, very, very stoned on Columbian Gold, he immediately conceived that it would be even more folkish and beautiful if recited with an old, Dark Age Brooklyn accent, viz:

  “Pretty little boidies

  Picking in the toidies!”

  He was so enamored of this that he quoted it, whenever he was drunk or stoned, for several months. The whole winter-spring season of 1983-84, if you mingled with the intelligentsia in Manhattan, you were likely to hear Case declaiming, in a style based partly on Orson Welles and partly on Charles Laughton, “Pretty little boidies/Picking in the toidies!” This finally found its way into Case’s NBI file—“Subject is inclined to quoting obscene poetry in mixed company”—and was even fed to the Beast.

  The NBI had a file on Case because one of their informants had stated that he was a frequent associate of Blake Williams. In fact, Case detested Williams and only was seen in his presence because it was impossible to go to the best parties on the Isle of Manhattan without encountering him. Oddly enough, the informant knew that quite well—but she also knew that her fees depended on the number of new suspects she reported each month.