Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  “You mean when Ignatz throws the brick—”

  “If Ignatz is a quantum physicist and is throwing a photon, Krazy or Schrödinger’s Cat can be in any of several eigenstates, um, yes, so that in effect the whole universe participates in the ah decision as to whether the Kat will be hit by the brick um ah or the photon ah as the case may be.”

  “Professor,” Natalie asked finally, driven to the Edge, “are you putting me on?”

  “My dear I am um merely giving you the most consistent and literal interpretation of Bell’s Theorem as developed by Dr. Jeffrey Chew at U.C.-Berkeley and Dr. Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics.”

  “The whole universe decides?”

  “Well there is um a certain degree of metaphor involved….”

  “You know, Professor”—Natalie sits up and gives him a level glance—“I met a midget once, a nasty little son-of-a-bitch, but he told me something I never forgot. All that exists is metaphor, he said, and whoever controls our metaphors controls us.”

  “As an anthropologist,” Blake Williams said, “I must agree. Are we living in an occult thriller, a porn movie, a philosophical treatise, a sci-fi novel? It depends on which parts of our experience we choose to highlight. That brings us to the question: Are we writing our life-scripts, or is there a Hidden Variable, as the new quantum theories suggest?”

  “You mean the whole universe will decide what we’re gonna do next?” Natalie wanted a straight answer.

  “Well um that’s the alternative to saying there are multiple universes where anything that can happen does happen ah and it’s quite democratic, really, since every lesser system within the whole system gets its vote.”

  Natalie’s semantic circuit was working on overload. “You’re telling me that each of us and the chair over there and each atom in us and in the chair and in Marvin’s cocaine—we all get one vote?”

  “Um perhaps we have carried the metaphor till it staggers …”

  “It sounds like Mozart’s music,” Natalie said, seeing the window again. “All as mechanical as a clockwork and yet as free as a dream….”

  HELL

  GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

  President Hubbard had largely abolished crime by abolishing prisons.

  This was one of her most astonishing achievements, since most primates thought prisons were preventatives, not causes, of crime.

  Eve Hubbard, needless to say, had always been a unique Terran, which was why she was the first Black President of Unistat. Although she was, like most brilliant people, extremely good-looking—the genetic link between health, hedonism, cleverness, and good looks (the “bright-eyes-and-bushy-tails” gestalt) is true in all species on all known planets—Eve had dropped out of films after a smash success as the supersexed ebony android in Gentlemen Prefer Clones. She had gone on to major in philosophy at UCLA, and was almost denied her Ph.D. because her thesis was a thorough rejection of all philosophies hitherto invented by Terran primates. She went on to become one of the first neurogeneticists. In fact, it was due to certain discoveries in primate genetics that she had decided to go into politics next.

  The Code Hubbard, the most important revision of primate jurisprudence since the Code Napoleon, divided all crimes into three classes.

  Crimes against convention—so-called victimless crimes—were not penalized at all. A citizen could be interrogated about each behavior only after complaints by a minimum of one hundred neighbors. The interrogators, a group of trained neurogeneticists, would then publish a report, either mildly recommending relocation of the heretic, or, much more commonly, strongly advising the neighbors to mind their own business.

  Many libertarians objected to this, since they wanted victimless crimes abolished utterly. Hubbard had pragmatically realized that such libertarian penology was impractical until the primates totally outgrew the morality delusion.

  Those who chose relocation were assigned by the Beast to an environment where their heresy was “normal.” Most of them found that the Beast recommended an L5 space-city, and most of them liked it when they got there. They had futique genes.

  Many of the heretics, of course, chose to stay where they were and go on annoying the bejesus out of their neighbors. This is the typical recalcitrant streak found in certain domesticated primates on all planets.

  Crimes against property were regarded as improper economics requiring adjustment. The felon was compelled to pay in full the value of that which had been appropriated or destroyed. If unable to pay, the felon then had a literal “debt to society.” The government paid the victim, and the felon repaid the government by working at half wages on some socially useful project, such as longevity research, space research, or just as a forest ranger in the growing number of national parks that were appearing since Industry was moved off the planet into Free Space.

  Crimes of violence were defined as the natural, inevitable, tragic, but intolerable resultant of some combination of genes, imprints, and conditioning. The biots who committed such acts were sent, without condemnation but irrevocably, to Hell.

  Hell had previously been the state of Mississippi. After the aborigines were resettled in an environment suitable for two-circuit (prehominid) primates, Mississippi became Hell by simply surrounding it with a laser shield that made escape impossible. Everything within the shield was intact. The violent biots were free to do what they wanted, and they soon had several forms of feudalism, war, piracy, commerce, slavery, and other early primate institutions functioning in a manner that seemed normal to them.

  Many violent biots and gene pools moved to Hell voluntarily, since it was the only remaining part of the world that fit their notions of proper primate society. Among those who migrated en masse and established sizable governments or robber bands in Hell were the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers, the American Nazi Party, Hell’s Angels, and most of the People’s Ecology Party.

  John Wayne, nearly one hundred years old, but looking and feeling around thirty due to FOREVER, and totally cured of all cancers by the Org pills, also went to Hell. He was rumored to be one of the richest slave traders and War Chiefs in the Western sector.

  “HELL IS HEAVEN” was the proud slogan of the region.

  WHITE LIGHT

  Hugh Crane celebrated his fourteenth birthday in 1938 by climbing into the bed of the family’s black maid, Sophie Hagé. She had observed his precocity and wasn’t surprised at the timing; and the deed itself, she had learned, was par for the sons and the female servants of the best families on Park Avenue. What was not normal was the passion that endured over several months, and the extent to which she herself was picked up and carried by it. Soon they were sharing secrets, just as if they were true lovers and equals, not master and servant.

  “Nails and glass in your shoes?” she asked him on the day that Nazi tanks crossed the border into Czechoslovakia.

  “I read about it in a book about saints that I got from the library on Forty-second Street,” he said.

  “But that’s crazy, mon.” She was from Haiti.

  “But it worked,” he said. “I saw Jesus.”

  “You saw Jesus?”

  “Well,” he said bashfully. “That wasn’t just from the nails in my shoes. It was after I whipped my back with wet rope for six hours.”

  Sophie gazed at him thoughtfully for a long time. “What you trying to do, boy?”

  “I’m learning how to live without fear,” he said simply. “You know my dad. He’s afraid of everything and everybody. Jews, Catholics, bad omens, the government, a broken mirror … you know. I just don’t want to live my life that way.”

  Sophie thought about it for three days. Then she told him there was a man he ought to meet.

  “What sort of man?” he asked.

  “A high priest of Voudon.”

  RED EYE

  Mister, what does it mean when a man crashes out?

  —IDA LUPINO IN High Sierra,

  SCRIPT BY JOHN HUSTON

  DECEMBER 24, 1983:

&nbs
p; The Eye, diamond-bright and glowing with a red inflammation, floated in the air at the head of the couch as Joe Malik returned to the Euclidean flatland at the bottom of the gravity well.

  Bloodshot eyes I’ve got to be haunted by, he thought bitterly, still dealing with the dimensions of the triangle. 3 × 3 × 3. No doubt about it. 333. The number of the Mighty Devil Choronzon, who had afflicted Dr. Dee and Sir Edward Kelley in the seventeenth century and raised hell for Aleister Crowley earlier in this century. Choronzon, the Lurker at the Threshold, who drove back any occultist who tried to push open the final door, cross the boundary of the unmarked state. Choronzon, avatar of the Great Lie, spirit of Constriction, protector of the Illuminati.

  Choronzon with a hangover, to judge by the redness of the eye.

  “Jeez that was great oh honey ah you doll you lovely Arab sheikh you,” Carol was bubbling happily.

  But Blake Williams plows on:

  “The Freudian, of course, sees much more in Krazy’s love for Ignatz. Sadomasochism, in fact. ‘Li’l dollink, always fetful,’ Krazy mutters contentedly as each brick bounces off her head. And worse: Krazy is female only in some sequences. In others this remarkable feline is indisputably male. Herriman, the psychoanalyst would suggest, had some AC-DC hang-ups when he conceived this fantasy.”

  “Sometimes, Professor, you remind me of Burroughs,” Natalie said.

  “Well, I do admire much of his work, especially The Job …” Williams was pleased by the comparison.

  “No, the other one, the guy who wrote Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

  “I? Remind you? Of Edgar Rice Burroughs?”

  “Of something he said once. He said that he had a lot of fun with his imagination and that he knew in a small way what a grand time God had in creating the universe.”

  Joe Malik didn’t even believe in Choronzon. The Skeptic within him had decided that the most operational model for those events which naïve occultists attribute to “Choronzon” was to classify them as synchronicities activated by the presence of the Trickster God archetype, in the Jungian collective unconscious, or Leary’s neurogenetic archives, or somewhere back down there in the thalamus or brainstem. To assume, even for a minute, that Choronzon had an objective existence beyond the archetype in the unconscious circuitry of the central nervous system was to collapse into prescientific theology and demonology.

  But, alas, the Skeptic was only one program inside the Malik biocomputer, and not at his best at moments like this. The Shaman tape began running in its own programs as the Skeptic faded out, and Joe noticed again for the thousandth time how the ego circuit melded with the new program as easily as it had with the old, so now he “was” Joe Malik the Shaman, son of a thousand years of Sufis, and if Choronzon was really messing around he betta watcha his ass.

  “It’s that motherfuckin’ loa,” Carol said angrily. “We didn’t do the exorcism right….”

  “Choronzon” was a mind-construct of the primates specializing in the Enochian version of Cabalistic magick. Talking out of two sides of their mouths at once, as was typical of primate mystics, the Cabalists said that Choronzon was the astral embodiment of all the illusions and deception on Terra (especially all the egotism and malice). They added that Choronzon was also a part of the psyche of the student which had to be faced and conquered before Illumination was complete. When asked whether Choronzon was then outside or inside, they usually answered “Both.”

  This reply made no sense at all until G. Spencer Brown published his Laws of Form.

  A loa was a mind-construct of those primates who specialized in Santaria, also called Magicko de Chango or Voudon. A loa, just like the Gentry, might on occasion be kindly disposed; but a guardian loa who was set on a woman to prevent her from copulating (except with the primate who had through Santaria created/projected/contacted said loa) was well known to be extremely malign, devious, fiendish, impish, devilish, and a Royal pain in the ass. The loas, like the Gentry and the various Cabalistic angels and demons, operated beneath the space-time continuum in “dream time,” where the true Free Masons create reality friezes.

  An archetype was a mind-construct of a primate named Carl Jung, who specialized in preneurological psychology. An archetype existed at the “psychoid” level, which was below that of individual or collective unconsciousness, where the organic and the inorganic meld and merge into psychoid matrices which, if nudged by the right archetype, would produce a reality-construct so astonishing that it would appear like magick or a very strange “coincidence.” Jung called these psychoid archetypal effects synchronicities.

  And Marvin Gardens, coked to the nines, is reading on and on with absolute absorption:

  Syngamy forms a zygote, which develops into a new diploid form, and the cycle begins anew

  Cycles that’s it, he thinks excitedly, we’re all permutations and combinations of that first amoeba every ejaculation another birthdeath or node in the everybranching whatchamacallit. Oh man this is heavy and I’m really grooving with it cycles in time great wheels turning like the Mayan calendar the genetic clock like music but oh shit maybe it’s just the coke I still haven’t figured out if the damn amoeba is immortal

  But Malik is maintaining his cool, albeit with some effort. “So all right,” he said aloud, facing the Eye unblinking, “are you just trying to scare me to death, or do you have a message for me?” Treat all of Them in a lofty way, lest They have cause to think thee weak, said Dr. Dee.

  “We better do the exorcism again,” whispered Carol Christmas—nude, golden, and delicious—also maintaining her cool.

  Carol had a great deal of experience at maintaining her cool. Her career had been typical of self-directed Unistat females who matured in the early 1970s: one rape at age fifteen while hitchhiking (she never hitchhiked again); two abortions; husband #1, who turned out to be so free of Macho and the Male Stereotype that even God’s Lightning couldn’t accuse him of Chauvinism (he wept most piteouasly when Carol got tired of supporting him and threw him out); husband #2, who was brilliant, kind, generous, sensitive, and a junky; a succession of mediocre lovers, with one or two she still treasured in memory but wouldn’t want to live with again for all the tea in Acapulco; producers who believed that an actress as gorgeous as she should only be cast in roles that justified getting all her clothes off sometime during the third act and several times in their private offices; husband #3, who had put the goddamned loa on her when they separated; and Ronnie

  “Ronnie is doing very well for a special child,” the doctor had told her the last time she visited the home. That was a hell of an elaborate euphemism for Mongolian idiot, she thought angrily; but the doctor was trying to be kind, and she forgave him.

  But two nights later she opened in another Off-Off-Off Broadway, Hiroshima Werewolf, and one critic described her as having “a special childlike quality reminiscent of Monroe.” She felt a wave of vertigo on reading that: If the doctor and the critic were not in cahoots to drive her over the edge, then those words were the most sinister kind of synchronicity. But she maintained her cool.

  Now she had a goddamned loa on top of everything else.

  She maintained.

  And Justin Case, deeper asleep, dapper as loop, was just waltzing along Owld Broadway with Judge Wishingdone, past Punker Hall, and there was a patchy fog and a zoo city zoo, one nixson and a vegetable. And he was blowin to adams and tilling the tyler, Don Judge Lincoln, mercurial and zany and hoppy, that high on the thigh-angle of him, cruising the dollarwars and until he was caught with Topsy! in the barn!! on the farce of youlie!!! No martha! that’s jokeson’s guile for you, toomsayer.

  But they were in the cherrytreeattric warld, an honest ape, he couldna tell a phone. One nukied individual, with Ma in her gurdjef and Pop in the easel, to the republic for witch’s hands, by the Donzerly Light. And who comes up but Indrarambam and Rashowsunnier and Shivabull, loads and toads of them, forty of them, with their fords and hords and their gauchos and cheekos and jumbos and harpoons inem
(corpus whalem!) asking about the launches and donors and the thousand and ninety things they ask, irking and rooking and snooping, prying and preying, forty of them, all buyers cotter, infernal reamin you sodage, doubt’s eternal fact, by all Chinatown howdials.

  Justin moans in his sleep as the Iranian Rastuys Shiites close in on him.

  “Papa Legba, Papa Legba, Papa Legba,” Joe Malik chants along with Carol Christmas, while the astral/ electrical/prajna/orgone/psionic/bioplasmic/odyle energy, or the Power of Imagination, in the room continues to escalate toward quantum wobble.

  Papa Legba was the Opener of the window, according to the Santaria metaphor. Like Maxwell’s Demon, he could increase or decrease entropy at whim, and take you into alternative eigenstates. He was the Boss Honcho on the astral potentia level, the alpha male of the pack. He’d kick the ass of any loa intruding on his good friends, and Carol had learned to be one of his very good friends since living with Hugo de Naranja.

  Joe Malik didn’t know from Papa Legba, but he understood the exorcism in his own terms. Papa Legba was the guise in which Thoth, that master Quick Change Artist, appeared in the Santaria or Voudon game. Joe knew about Thoth from Hagbard Celine, who always employed the Cabalistic/Golden Dawn metaprograms when attempting quantum alterations in the fabric of reality. Thoth commandered seventy-eight servitors, each one encoded in his Book of Signals to mankind, ordinarily known as the Tarot deck. Each Tarot card was synchronistic with a different quantum eigenvalue and the arrangement of the cards, when shuffled at random, revealed the Hidden Variable causing the “acausal” quantum jump to the next reality-mesh.

  Malik the Skeptic tended to regard that explanation as pseudoscientific balderdash, but Malik the Shaman found it useful as a working hypothesis when critters like Chronozon went bump in the night.