Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  Professor Nosferatu of Columbia, an old friend of Rhoda’s, listened raptly as she recited the words to him. “That’s not Tibetan, whatever he told you,” he said. He repeated it with correct pronunciation: “IO PAN IO PAN PAN IO PANGENITOR IO PANPHAGE. It’s an invocation of the god Pan in classic Greek. ‘Io Pan, Io Pan, Pan. Io Pan-All-Creator, Io Pan-All-Devourer.’” He looked at her curiously. “You know, I’ve heard some rather odd rumors about you and him….”

  “Whatever you’ve heard,” she said with a faint smile, “is probably true. I want you to give me the name of the best shrink you know. I want somebody to work on my head and help me to stay away from him.”

  TRADE AIDS

  GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

  After the RICH Economy had revolutionized the lives and expectations of Unistaters on and off Terra, Eve Hubbard realized that the time was now ripe to abolish poverty entirely. She did this by declaring every citizen a shareholder in the L5 space-cities and distributing National Dividends every year.

  Again, Hubbard’s political genius was evident. Others who had proposed such a plan in the past (e.g., the engineers C. H. Douglas and R. Buckminster Fuller, the inventor Tom Edison, the semanticist Alfred Korzybski, the physicist Frederic Soddy) had assumed such dividends would have to be “money.” This proposal, in that form, always aroused heated opposition from the alpha males of the banking business, who understood well that an expanding money supply would lower the interest rate, seriously threatening their profits.

  Hubbard called her National Dividend tickets “trade aids,” a term devised by a public relations firm she had commissioned to make the idea palatable to domesticated primates.

  Trade aids were like money only in that they could be exchanged for commodities or services. They were unlike money in that they could not be loaned at interest; the bankers kept their monopoly on the interest market and were mollified.

  Trade aids were also unlike money in that they could not be hoarded. Each ticket was dated, and lost value at 1 percent per month after the issue date, becoming totally valueless in one hundred months, or eight years and four months. There was thus a built-in incentive to spend the trade aids as soon as possible.

  When the first trade aid dividends were distributed, it turned out that even the poorest Unistat citizens had the equivalent of $80,000 for that year, in purchasing power, even though the tickets were not called “money.”

  Citizens with that much purchasing power have huge demand, in the economic sense of ability to buy. The economy expanded more rapidly than ever, with new businesses springing up continually, both on Terra and in the space-cities.

  The rest of Terra was soon copying these innovations—the socialist countries most slowly and grudgingly. By 1995 starvation had been eliminated everywhere—just as had been the goal of the Hunger Project, started by a California primate named Erhard back in the 1970s. By then Hubbard had been out of the White House for six years and busy again at genetics and longevity research. She often said to friends that her whole political career had been merely an experiment in altering the parameters of primate sociobiology.

  TO CROSS AGAIN

  DECEMBER 24, 1983:

  Simon Moon toked at his pipe, pulling the hash deep into his lungs, floating with it.

  December 23 had been a hell of a day. Ubu and Knight and the other guys from the FBI had been all over the shop demanding to know why the Beast couldn’t tell them any more about the missing scientists and warning ominously that President Lousewart was Personally Concerned and so on and so forth: the usual governmental craperoo. Simon only stayed on the job for the sheer pleasure he got out of working with the Beast, fucking up the government from within. But even that pleasure was wearing thin, and he hopped a suborbital to New York just to be away from everything Washingtonian for the holidays.

  He exhaled a fog of cannabis molecules and returned his attention to his favorite bedtime reading, Brown’s Laws of Form:

  To cross again is not to cross.

  It must have been the hash, but suddenly that simple axiomatic statement was fraught with new and urgent meaning. A knight’s move on the word processor would switch F to N, the FBI to the NBI, abolishing Knightness in the process.

  Only the quantum inseparability principle would explain why Furbish Lousewart went away in the same rotation.

  Simon found that he had wandered or teleported from the bedroom to the toilet and was staring in absorption at the sink. The two handles, one saying H and the other C, seemed to have enormous Cabalistic meaning, connected, perhaps, with the fact that Joe Malik had been Jo Malik before the collapse of the state vector.

  Of course, out-of-the-book experiences are not yet recognized by orthodox science. The parapsychologists who dare to speculate about such things are ritually torn asunder and dismembered by Marvin Gardens in the back pages of the Scientific American. Still, this does not discourage Simon Moon, who is, after all, a close associate of the Beast and hip to the programmer’s trade secret that all that exists is information: everything else is mammalian sense-impression and thus hallucinatory. Besides, Simon is doing it right now: and can see in one instant, in the twinkling of an eye, the total contents of the novel, a miracle of microminiaturization in the frontal lobes, as the metaprogramming circuit clicks into action.

  The novel was called The Universe Next Door. It existed—was bought and sold and loaned—in a super-continuum called the United States of America, which was Unistat enlarged into other dimensions.

  Everything in the novel was inevitable, as everything in the supercontinuum containing the novel was inevitable.

  Everything that happened in Unistat had to happen, as everything in the United States of America had to happen.

  That which was above was precisely reflected in that which was below.

  To cross again was not to cross.

  “So all right,” Joe Malik said, staring at Simon through a triangle, “are you just trying to scare me to death or do you have a message for me?”

  Simon was on the balcony of Mary Margaret Wildeblood’s apartment again and somebody was staring out at him in horror. “My God, it’s Bigfoot!”

  Simon reentered the form, and contemplated it.

  Civilization was destroyed by nuclear holocaust in May 1984 because Furbish Lousewart was a certain kind of man and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart was a certain other kind of man; and they were what they were because of genetic programs and accidental imprints and conditioning and some learning, and because of the society around them; and that society was the resultant of various conflicting historical and neurogenetic causes; and Lousewart became President because of a thousand other factors, only one of which, the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, was itself the resultant of thousands of factors, including the usual struggles between the engineers and the financiers; and to explain Stuart you would have to start with the institution of slavery six thousand years earlier; and …

  Everything in the novel was inevitable, as everything in the supercontinuum containing the novel was inevitable.

  And yet Simon had escaped from the novel.

  Although not a member of the Warren Belch Society, Simon Moon was, of course, aware of the theory that there was a universe somewhere in which Bacon’s major works were still attributed to somebody else. Simon, naturally, was not imaginative enough to conceive that in that universe Bacon had died of pneumonia while conducting experiments in refrigeration. In Simon’s usual universe, the author of Novum Organum, The New Atlantis, King Lear, etc., had lived on to discover the inverse-square law of gravitation, and Isaac Newton was remembered only as a somewhat eccentric astrologer.

  In another novel, midway between the old universe and the new, Simon himself had been shot dead by a Chicago cop during the Democratic Convention of 1968. Over there, Bacon had been bold enough to admit publicly his high rank in the Invisible College (Illuminati) and had been beheaded by James I for heresy. In that universe, not just civilization, but all life on
Terra, came to a very hideous end in 1984, because the President was constipated one day and made the wrong decision. Their technology was so advanced that half the solar system went nova along with Earth.

  In the next universe Simon explored, we were saved because a red-haired Tantric Engineer named Babs Lashtal gave the Prez a first-class Grade-A blow job in the Oval Room at 10 A.M., relaxed his tense muscles, pacified his glands, soothed his frustrations, and inspired him to act relatively sane for the rest of the day. He did not push the button, thereby preserving millions of species of living forms on Earth and thousands of microscopic species on Venus.

  Babs Lashtal, of course, was regarded with contempt by all right-thinking people, who had no idea that they owed their lives to her skillful extraction of presidential spermatozoa by means of tender, gentle, gracefully rhythmic kissing, licking, and sucking of the presidential wand.

  Even if they had known about it, the right-thinking people would still say Babs should be ashamed of herself.

  The whole novel was rather didactic, Simon decided. It was written only to prove a point: Never underestimate the importance of a blow job. It had been necessary to write such a novel because the people over there were so ignorant and superstitious they still called Tantric Engineers “whores” and other degrading names.

  Every universe is inevitable; but there are as many universes as there are probability matrices. The Metaprogrammer chooses which universe he will enter.

  There is a love that binds it all together, and that love is expressed in primate language as the love of a parent for a child, so Simon was not surprised to find Tim Moon pervading everything, or at least a kind of continuous Tim Moon potential that could be encoded again in another book or that could remain latent for long times, vaguely permeating every book. There were hundreds of thousands of other Wobs there, Frank Little and Joe Hill and Pat Murfin and Neal Rest and Big Bill Heywood and they were all singing like an outlaw Hallelujah Chorus:

  Though cowards cringe and traitors sneer

  We’ll keep the Black Flag flying here

  and Dad himself spoke to me, I swear it, saying, “Just tell them this, son: Capitalism is still nothing but a shit sandwich. The more bread you have, the less shit you’ve got to eat, and the less bread you have, the more shit you’ve got to eat. Tell them all.” And yet that seems to mark the experience as brain-generated: the style is Simon-puer not Tim-pater even if the idea is most certainly something old Tim Moon would want to communicate. A collaboration perhaps between the part of Tim Moon that lives on in Simon’s memory banks and the part that lives eternally in the Mind of the Author of Our Being.

  “Hey, wait, before you turn the page and get into the next section, I want to say one more thing. Those faucets on the sink mean something. Every time I stare at them in deep meditation I almost remember something important. Two faucets on a sink, one saying H and one saying C. Remember H. C. That’s important.”

  The e continues to fall.

  THE GYPSY SWITCH

  The future exists first in Imagination, then in Will, then in Reality.

  —EVE HUBBARD

  In spring 1963, while a Mr. Oswald was ordering a Carcano-Mannlicher rifle through the mail, Hugh Crane was in Cambridge, meeting with a famous psychologist who had recently been ejected from Harvard for original research and poor usage of the First Amendment.

  “It takes you beyond the body rapture of marijuana?” Crane asked.

  “That’s the least of it,” said the psychologist. “It takes you into something like the parallel universe of science fiction. I’m beginning to think they’re parallel neurological universes or different styles of head-games….”

  “Games?” Crane said.

  “Life-scripts, novels,” the psychologist suggested, trying other metaphors.

  “I dig it,” Crane said quietly. “How soon can I try this lysergic acid di-what’s-it?”

  “Diethylamide.”

  “How soon?” Crane repeated. “You’ve got a very willing guinea pig, Dr. Frankenstein.”

  Cary Grant had already told all the show-biz columnists that this magic chemical had changed his whole life for the better; Cagliostro, typically, went further and began urging its use on everyone. When the backlash struck he and the researcher who had initiated him and a few other researchers and a couple of famous poets and novelists were widely denounced as “high priests of the drug cult.” He became a favorite topic for the Sunday supplements and the more ox-like men’s magazines—any hack could make a lively story by rehashing his pot arrests, his morals busts, the rumors about other sexual oddities, his public advocacy of LSD and anarcho-atheism, his mantra, “There is no governor anywhere,” and the increasingly popular speculation that his escapes were actually performed through black magic.

  It was a disappointment to all the people who loved hating him when he suddenly married the screen’s best known sex goddess, Norma Nelson, and settled down to what appeared to be a very monogamous and un-newsworthy fidelity trip.

  Norma herself was delighted that all those rumors about his sadism were obviously untrue. Their sex life was quite normal, and the Mass of the Holy Ghost was performed without restraints. She discovered, also, the basic secret of his escapes: he never accepted a challenge at once, always jetting on “urgent business” to another part of the country and only taking languid notice of the wager, casually accepting it with total cool, a few days later. The interlude, she found, was spent in duplicating the conditions proposed and finding the gimmick that would work and the misdirection that would distract attention at the crucial moment. She also learned the essence of the okanna borra, or “gypsy switch,” which is the basis of almost all magic and most con games. The people who thought their own screws, bolts, and chains were used in Cagliostro’s escapes were as mistaken as those who think the handkerchief with a hundred dollars that they give the gypsy for blessing is the same handkerchief that comes back to them.

  She also learned what alchemy was all about. “I thought that was all superstition,” she said once, pointing at his shelves of old books on the transmutation of elements, the Mass of the Holy Ghost, the Cabala, and the elixir of life.

  “We do it almost every night.” He smiled. “You have the Cup and I have the Sword. Solve et coagula, divide and unite—that’s why I have to go down on you again at the end. The mystic number 210—that means us two becoming one in the peak and the falling into the void. You’ve got the Triangle and I cause the physical manifestation within it.”

  “You mean it’s all a code? Why did they have to hide it?”

  “Those who didn’t got burned at the stake,” he said. “Read about the witches and the Knights Templar sometime.”

  He also began teaching her the Tarot. “Now, the Fool corresponds to aleph in Kabala, the ox, or bull-god Dionysus. But aleph is the path from Keser to Chokmah, and, therefore, the Holy Ghost or semen. The Magus is beth, the house or temple—that is, the path from Keser to Binah, the womb …”

  “Do you really think you’re going to live forever?” she asked him once.

  “If not,” he said, “I’ll die trying.”

  WISE GUYS AND NEBBISHES

  When Simon Moon was appointed Chief of the Computer Section at GWB-666, he immediately junked all the personnel tests then in use and replaced them with a one-question test of his own devising based on the Vlad Enigma. Applicants were simply told the story of Vlad and the monks by an interviewer and asked which monk Vlad impaled. Those who said Vlad impaled the lying flatterer were classified as nebbishes by Simon; they were the kind of fools who still, despite all evidence to the contrary, regarded government and those in authority as honest and just. They would tell the truth to superiors. They were hired at once. “An office full of Eichmanns and Calleys,” Simon said proudly. “Not one of them will ever question an order or ask an embarrassing question.” He could program endless anarchy, and they would never suspect it, because he was above them in the pack hierarchy.

&nb
sp; Those who said Vlad impaled the honest monk, on the other hand, were rejected for employment at GWB. Simon called them the Wise Guys and secretly arranged for a recruiter from the Discordian Society to contact them later. They didn’t believe a damned thing government said or did, had heretical opinions on dozens of subjects, and usually smoked dope. They emphatically did not belong in a bureaucracy.

  Sometimes Simon called the nebbishes Homo neophobia and the wise guys Homo neophilia.

  But that was in another novel. Simon didn’t even know if he was still working with the Beast in this novel.

  He was becoming identified with the form.

  Some things remained constant under the transformation of the Knight move—Marvin Gardens still had his paranoia and his Vlad the Barbarian books, the missing scientists were still missing, Simon was still a mathematician (Mary Margaret had said so, at the party, even though he was only dimly there this time around).

  But some things had altered considerably—Josephine Malik was Joseph Malik, F.D.R. Stuart was an editor instead of a revolutionary, Hubbard was President instead of Lousewart.

  But all that was trivial. Simon got out his pen and began jotting, in the margins of Laws of Form, the important things he had learned in his out-of-book experience:

  A novel, or a universe, is a Whole System.

  Who we are, and what we do, depends on which novel or universe we are in. Every part is a function of the Whole.