Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  Polly Esther, finding herself the heir of Dacron’s farraginous empire, quickly appointed professional executives to manage most of it; but she took over the newspaper personally. She was a fan of a TV show called Lou Grant and rather fancied herself as becoming another Mrs. Pynchon.

  Mrs. Pynchon was the publisher of the paper on the Lou Grant show. She was tough enough to eat barbed wire and spit tacks, but she was also cool and elegant. Polly Esther wanted to be like that.

  She also had a secret desire to be the other Mrs. Pynchon, the wife of the novelist. She had read one of Pynchon’s novels once while dieting, and maybe she had used just a little bit too many of those diet pills, because she believed every word of it. She was still convinced that the baskets on the street saying WASTE meant We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire.

  Naturally, Polly Esther believed both of Bonny Benedict’s fictions of the day. She had long suspected that both Oswald and Lousewart were agents of Silent Tristero’s Empire.

  Polly Esther was about forty-two but she could easily pass for thirty-two. This was because she was very rich.

  Once a year Polly Esther went to a ranch in Nevada which looked like a luxury motel and treated its guests like the inmates of a concentration camp. They fed Polly Esther on a diet what would barely sustain life and tasted horrible. They made her exercise several hours a day. A brutal staff insulted her, mocked her, bullied her, and got her back on her feet again, running, every time she thought she’d drop from exhaustion. They also shot her full of Gerovitol, methamphetamines, and vitamins three times a day. They charged her fifty-five hundred dollars.

  Some of this actually had a slight effect on her body, but most of it was directed at her mind. She came out of this two-week ordeal, each year, convinced that she had suffered enough to deserve to be beautiful for another fifty weeks.

  She was indeed beautiful, and had been a flaming redhead for so long that only a few people in Xenia, Ohio, remembered her as a dark-haired girl who had to leave town because of a scandal in the local Baptist church choir.

  The robot who traveled under the name “Frank Sullivan” was in New York the next morning and saw Bonny Benedict’s column. “Oh, Burger, Lourde, and corruption,” he muttered, the newspaper trembling in his hands.

  He immediately canceled his business in New York and hopped an orbital to Washington, where he leapt into a cab, sped to Naval Intelligence, and galloped into the office of Admiral Mounty (“Iron Balls”) Babbit.

  Babbit was in charge of “Dungeon and Dragon” operations, including the “Sullivan” matter; these were machinations so murky that they were not even known to those normally cleared for covert operations.

  “How the holy Potter Stewart did she get hold of this?” pseudo-Sullivan demanded, waving Bonny Benedict’s column.

  Babbit stopped breathing for a minute as he read the Second Oswald item.

  “Jesus and Mary Christ,” he said finally, in a hollow tone. ‘The Briggsing Bryanting Frankel, she must have a source in the CIA. Those mother-Stewarting sons-of-bitches, they’ll do anything to blow one of our operations.”

  This was typical of Old Iron Balls, as his men called him. He was convinced that everything malign emanated from Central Intelligence over in Alexandria. They spent all their time, he believed, plotting to discredit Naval Intelligence, and all because a high CIA official had once caught him, Mounty Babbit, in an intimate moment with the CIA man’s mistress.

  “Those bastards,” he repeated in a tone as cold as official charity. “I’d like to blow that Burger-house in Alexandria off the face of the earth and every limp-wristed Briggsing Bryanting Harvard egghead in it.”

  But that was only one level of Old Iron Balls’s mind—the public level. Much deeper, he was already plotting various scenarios that resulted from the sudden deaths of Bonny Benedict or “Frank Sullivan.”

  Of course, Babbit did not for a moment contemplate assassination in the vulgar sense; there had been more than enough of that sort of thing back in the sixties and it had made all sorts of trouble for everyone in the Intelligence game. Babbit was guided by a maxim now universally accepted in the cloak-and-dagger business although originally formulated by Beria of the NKVD: “Any damned fool can commit murder. Any halfway trained operative can arrange convincing suicide. It takes an artist to manage an authentic natural death.”

  Pseudo-Sullivan had a larger than average share of ESP, as did many persons in the Intelligence game. “You know,” he said casually, “I’ve left Certain Papers in a Certain Place to be opened in case of sudden death …”

  “Oh, you needn’t worry about anything like that,” Babbit said hastily. “Why, you’re one of our most valuable um men. We wouldn’t dream of …” Blah-blah-blah. It was a set speech, for occasions like this.

  He was thinking of Bonny Benedict and of her publisher, that hoity-toity rich Frankel-Briggser, Polly Esther Doubleknit.

  The next fuse ignited by the Oswald-in-Hong-Kong story was in the frontal cortex of a balding, nervous man named Justin Case, who was living in a sociological treatise. That is, people made him so anxious that he shielded himself from them with a cocoon of words and concepts which had gradually become more real to him than the people were. He was a heavyweight Intellectual.

  Justin Case had more Moral Concern than was good for a man. He worried about racism and sexism and imperialism and injustice and the general cussedness of his species; he agonized over each and every person on the planet who might be getting a raw deal; if you put enough martinis in him, he would start singing “Joe Hill” and “We Shall Overcome” and “Which Side Are You On?” and other old Labor and Civil Rights songs.

  Naturally, Case was the editor of a Liberal Magazine. The magazine was called Confrontation and had been started by a mad Arab named Joe Malik, who abandoned it in 1968 to enter a Trappist monastery. Malik had been traumatized by the Democratic Convention that year and told everybody he intended to spend the rest of his life in vehement and continuous prayer.

  Malik left behind a note which still hung on the bulletin board at Confrontation. It said:

  Qol: Hua Allahu achad; Allahu Assamad; lam yalid

  walam yulad; walam yakun lahu kufwan achad.

  Nobody at Confrontation could read Arabic, but they all liked to stop and look at the note occasionally, wondering what it meant.

  The stockholders had appointed Case to the editorship, after Malik retreated to the cloister, because Justin had as much righteous indignation as the mad Arab but was not so flaky.

  By spring 1984, Case had 120 bound volumes of books, articles, and press clippings about the J.F.K. assassination, since he was still Righteously Indignant about the palpably obvious cover-up involved in the Warren Report.

  The day that pseudo-Sullivan wigged out over Bonny Benedicts contribution to the mythology of the assassination, Case calmly clipped that item and added it to his file.

  Three-quarters of the other material in Case’s file was also fictitious. One-third of this disinformation had been generated by Intelligence Agencies—domestic, foreign, and extraterrestrial—as covers or screens for their own activities in and around Dallas in 1963. Another third had been produced by sincere, dedicated, sometimes avid conspiracy buffs, weaving their own webs of confusion as they searched for the elusive truth. The last third had been created, like the Bonny Benedict item, by journalists following Hearst’s advice about what to do when there was no news.

  Anybody trying to find out “what really happened” from this collection of mythology would be so confused that the significant fact of the extraterrestrial intervention would never be apparent.

  Case did not suspect any of this. He loved his J.F.K. file. He was convinced that someday the crucial piece would come to him, he would insert it into the file, and the whole jigsaw would make sense.

  He never realized that the one detail which gave everything away was that while Oswald was firing from the sixth-floor window he was also having a Coke on the second floor
and mingling with the crowd in the street.

  Like most liberals, Justin Case lacked imagination and never took seriously all the evidence of extraterrestrial activity on earth during the past forty years.

  Case was currently having an affair with the Hollywood actress Carol Christmas.

  Carol was renowned among the heterosexual male population for having the biggest Brownmillers since Jayne Mansfield; so far only women and a few Gay men had noticed that she could also act.

  Carol had been married four times. She had had three abortions. Like other famous Beauties, she was always dieting, and hence, a little bit high-strung. She was also a disciple of General E. A. Crowley, the eccentric English explorer who had discovered the North Pole and claimed there was a hole there leading down to the center of the Earth. Carol devoutly believed Crowley’s yarn that there was a whole civilization down there, inside the Earth, run by green-skinned women.

  Carol believed this because she had a great artistic faith in the principle of balance. In her probability continuum—in the series of quantum eigenstates that had crystalized into her universe—the whole outside of the planet seemed to be run by white-skinned males. It was only fair that the inside should be run by green-skinned females.

  Carol was having three other affairs at the same time as her amour with Justin Case. There was a hairdresser in Hollywood (bi, not Gay) who was very talented at Bryanting and Briggsing—two arts at which totally straight men, in Carol’s opinion, were usually a bit clumsy. There was also François Loup-Garou, the painter, in Paris, who adored her madly, as only a painter can adore a woman. And there was a bitter but brilliant Black novelist in Chicago named Franklin Stuart.

  Justin Case knew all about these other amours; after all, he read Bonny Benedict’s column every day. Bonny kept the world informed about which celebrities were Potter Stewarting each other. She did this in a way that was perfectly clear to every reader but totally without any clear meaning in a court of law, in case somebody got irritated and tried to sue her. What she did was to write something like “Hollywood sexpot Carol Christmas and Black novelist Frank Stuart are an item these days.”

  Everybody knew what “an item” meant.

  When Bonny wrote that a couple were “a hot item” many of her readers were mildly puzzled, but assumed she was insinuating some fantastic sexual acrobatics. Actually, it only meant that Bonny was trying to avoid stylistic monotony; occasionally, she even switched it to “a torrid item,” which led to even more lascivious fantasies for some of her readers.

  Justin Case didn’t object to Carol Christmas’s other affairs because he accepted it as a fact of life that actors are hypersexed, just as coal miners are prone to black lung disease and novelists to booze and weird drugs. Besides, jealousy was a sign of possessiveness, and possessiveness was illiberal. And, anyway—as he usually concluded his ruminations on this subject, during the infrequent moments when he thought of it at all—Carol’s career kept them apart most of the time, and he was not so naive as to expect somebody of her youth and beauty to resist all temptations.

  And it was the 1980s, wasn’t it?

  Actually, Case was a bit of an unconscious psychic—that is, he was aware of quantum probability waves, although not consciously. He sensed that there were approximately 1050 universes in which he had lusted after Carol and never got into her Frankel even once. That unconscious psychic knowledge kept him content with this universe, where he was her part-time lover.

  Carol Christmas had starred in the first hard-core porn movie to win the Academy Award, Deep Mongolian Steinem Job. The film had been directed by Stanley Kubrick, after he read a satirical novel in which the author had imagined what would happen if Kubrick set out to make a serious and even artistic porn film.

  Despite the success of Deep Mongolian Steinem Job, most humans still did not realize that all fantasies tend to become realities, in one universe or another.

  Carol did realize it, however. She was currently involved in approximately 250,000,000 sex acts every hour.

  REAL HOUSES, REAL OFFICES

  The sensuous California sun hung low and sultry over San Francisco, turning everybody’s mood in a low and sultry direction. It was a day when anything could happen. Cops helped old ladies across the street. Bankers gave loans to people who really needed them. A high school girl was heard to speak a sentence in English, without “ya know” before the predicate object.

  And a mysterious hand scrawled “The enormous tragedy of the dream nor dashed a thousand kim” on the wall of the Van Ness Street entrance of Orgasm Research.

  Dr. Frank Dashwood (dum dum de! Who’s Zelenka?) arrived from another novel.

  He turned into the Van Ness parking lot of ORGRE, executed a smart translation of his sleek MG into the RESERVED area, and saw the incomprehensible scrawl.

  That damned Ezra Pound again. Why do I have to be haunted by a schizo with an obsession about Fernando Poo?

  At nine-oh-one Dr. Dashwood passed through the solid oak door saying in gold letters:

  FRANCIS DASHWOOD, M.D.

  PRESIDENT

  There was nothing urgent on the memo pad, so Dashwood began opening the incoming mail leisurely.

  Dear Dr. Dashwood,

  I am writing to you as a Sex Expert because I don’t know where else to turn. I already wrote to Ann Landers, but she just told me to take cold showers. My problem is that I am madly, hopelessly, passionately in love with Linda Lovelace. I’ve actually seen Deep Throat ninety-three times now and nothing can get her out of my mind. Other women leave me cold; I only want Linda, Linda, Linda. She has so much beauty and charm and sweetness and, my God, can she eat Rehnquist! I know this is hopeless because even though I’ve written a novel about Vlad the Impaler and made lots of money, I’m still very shy with women. (Some of them are extraterrestrials, I have discovered.) Why did God make such an unjust universe? Can you help me?

  Dr. Dashwood frowned thoughtfully, then scrawled, “Send this nut the see-a-psychiatrist letter.”

  Dum de dum de dum de. Next!

  Dr. Orgasm R. Institute

  Frank Dashwood

  666 Malaclypse

  San Francisco, Calif.

  Dear Dr. Institute:

  We are sending you this personalized letter because we know that a man like you, Dr. Institute, cares about his investments and wants to know the facts about Inflation.

  Next! (And remember: look up that Zelenka.)

  Dear Dr Dashwood,

  I am a paraplegic and therefore I am incapable of normal coitus. My sweetheart and I, fortunately, have found that oral sex satisfies us fully—I Marshall her Frankel and then she gives me a Steinem Job. But this creates a terrible legal conundrum, since she lives across the Mississippi River in Iowa and I am a citizen of Illinois. Iowa has a very strict law against oral sex, which they classify as sodomy (due to a mistranslation of the Old Testament, I believe). Thus, we can’t have sex in Iowa. Now, Illinois has had no anti-sodomy statutes since the 1960s, so you might think our problem can be solved by having sex in Illinois. Unfortunately, she can’t afford to quit her job in Iowa, and thus every time she travels across the river to have sex with me, she is crossing a state line, which makes me vulnerable under the Mann Act. Is there any possible solution to this legal double-bind?

  Dr. Dashwood was intrigued. He began thinking of topological transformations, non-Euclidean geometrics, Wheeler’s wormholes in superspace … But then he realized he was Romanticizing, just because the puzzle had sparked his imagination. In ordinary four-dimensional Heisenberg space-time, there was no way out of the paradox: If the writer crossed the river, he and his lady were committing sodomy in Iowa, and if the lady crossed the river, they were violating the Mann Act in Illinois.

  Logicians dream up such Strange Loops, Dashwood reflected, just to make games for other logicians; but lawyers create them to make more jobs for lawyers.

  Dashwood scrawled, “Tell him his lady better damned well find a job in Illinois.” />
  Next.

  Dear Dr. Dashwood,

  Once there was a man who was condemned to live on the moon. He knew the punishment was just, because he hated his father and such a sin deserves an extreme penalty. Nonetheless, his isolation was terrible and there were times when he thought his heart would break, just because he could never hear a human voice again.

  Well, he made the best of his cruel situation. He began sending messages from the moon, telling everything he knew about life on earth—all the joys and agonies and struggles, “the horror and the boredom and the glory” of the long climb upward from the slime to higher and higher consciousness. The people back on earth loved these signals, which contained so much of life’s drama, and they praised him extravagantly, and that gave him some comfort through the long years of his exile.

  Once, however, he sat down and made a message about his own loneliness, telling how it feels to be separated from humanity by 250,000 miles of Dead Silence.

  He called it the Hammerklavier Sonata.

  Try to plot that on one of your graphs, you sizeist son-of-a-bitch.

  Ezra Pound

  Fair Play for Fernando Poo

  Committee

  The intercom buzzed.

  “A man is here from the FBI,” Miss Karrig said nervously.

  Dr. Dashwood began doing pranayama immediately. “Send … him … in … right … away …“he said between deep breaths.