Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  And as everybody meditated on the miraculous return of the Shivalingam, old Ringh remembered how General Crowley promised, when he had to return to the West, that he would use what he had learned in India to teach the whole world how the phallic spark of Imagination, represented by the 1 or lingam, generated everything out of absolute 0, the dark yoni, nothingness.

  PART ONE FLOSSING

  Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

  —ROMAN POLANSKI

  OCCULT TECHNOLOGY

  Let me control a planet’s oxygen supply and I don’t care who makes the laws.

  —GREAT CTHULHU’S STARRY WISDOM BAND

  When Clem Cotex decided to program himself into the head space of the First Bank of Religiosophy, he sent five dollars to Bad Ass, Texas, for Dr. Horace Naismith’s cassette tape, “The Occult Technology of Money and the Moneylords.” By the time the tape arrived in the mail, Clem had been through so many eigenstates, both as male and female, that he no longer wondered about “the stuff in the tomato juice” and was merely moderately surprised occasionally that most people were not as flexible in their thinking as he was. In fact, Clem had been a Scientologist, a solipsist, and a Logical Positivist, among other things, in the interim.

  Filling a pipe with Alamout Black, the hashish of the Assassins, Clem lit up, toked deeply, and began playing the tape of “The Occult Technology of Money and the Moneylords.”

  “The Federal Reserve System—a private bank responsible to nobody, despite its name—creates money out of nothing,” Naismith began in a pleasant Texas twang. Clem toked again and began to grok Naismith in his fullness. The tape played on and Clem toked again each time he felt the need to grok more deeply.

  Naismith quoted Buckminster Fuller (the only Unistat President ever to resign from office) and Ezra Pound, the folk singer, and John Adams and Tom Edison and a lot of other people who had long ago been on Clem’s list of folks who had probably been given some of the “stuff” in the tomato juice. All of these men, Naismith pointed out, had proposed money systems more efficient and more just than the present Federal Reserve System.

  “There is no one money system that was ordained by God,” Naismith said. “They were all invented by human beings and can be improved by human beings.

  “Now, what is money?” Naismith asked. “Money is information. Ask any computer programmer about that, if you don’t believe it. Money is a signal, a unit of pure information. It is as abstract as mathematics. Cattle served as money once. So did leather. So did the precious metals. They were commodity monies, because they were worth something in themselves. Modern paper money is pure information, worth absolutely zilch, except for the signals printed on it.” Clem really began to get Naismith’s perspective. He toked again, feeling the Big Idea behind the First Bank of Religiosophy.

  “Money in the modern world,” Naismith went on, “is no more than a promise to pay. If you look at the bills in your wallet right now, you’ll see what they’re promising to pay. They’re promising to pay you more paper. They don’t have to give you a gram of gold or silver or any real commodity. They’ll give you more paper if you want to trade in the paper you already have. Didn’t that ever strike you as a little bit funny?

  “Think of it this way,” Naismith said, warming to his subject. “This is a corny old Sufi parable, but it might help you to get the picture.”

  The great Sufi sage Nasrudin, Naismith said, once invented a magic wand. Wishing to patent such a valuable device, Nasrudin waved the wand and created a patent office, which immediately appeared in 3-D Technicolor.

  Nasrudin then walked in and told the clerk, “I want to patent a magic wand.”

  “You can’t do that,” said the clerk. “There is no such thing as a magic wand.”

  Nasrudin immediately waved his wand again, and the patent office and the clerk both disappeared.

  “Jesus and Ludwig Christ!” Clem Cotex cried. He jumped up and turned off the tapes, totally At One with the doctrine of Religiosophy. “Money is information,” he muttered, beginning to pace the room, stoned out of his gourd. “Holy snakes and ladders. ‘Humanity is the symbol-using class of life, and those who control symbols control us.’ I read that in Korzybski aeons ago. Information!”

  Clem sat down at his desk and spread out a large piece of paper. He drew an elaborate scroll around it and printed at the top, “COTEX RESERVE SYSTEM.” He made it a cashier’s check to the Treasury of Unistat for ten million dollars, to be repaid at the prime interest rate of 15 percent. He then decorated another piece of paper, making it a Unistat National Bond, payable to the Cotex Reserve System for ten million dollars, thereby giving CRS the credit to loan ten million to Unistat.

  He then switched the pieces of paper around on the desk. Cotex Reserve seemed to be ten million dollars ahead, and yet Unistat owed them ten million plus 15 percent interest per year.

  (“You can’t do that. There is no such thing as a magic wand.”)

  Clem laughed hysterically. He remembered Simon Moon trying to explain Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form to him: “To cross again is not to cross.” Inflation, deflation, recession, depression: they were all like Nasrudin’s patent office.

  Clem knew he was in the state where synchronicities occur, so he went to his bookcase, picked a volume at random, and stuck his finger in, looking for the Message that would turn the whole experience into a full-scale Satori.

  He was in The Nature of the Physical World by Sir Arthur Eddington, and the sentence he had found was:

  We have certain preconceived ideas about location in space which have come down to us from apelike ancestors.

  Clem Cotex laughed for nearly fifteen minutes. The next time he met Blake Williams, he unleashed his Illumination in an aphorism that he was convinced would, for once, startle the seemingly unflappable anthropologist.

  “Money is the Schrödinger’s Cat of economics,” Clem said, waiting for some sensational reaction.

  “Oh,” Williams said quietly, “you’ve noticed that too?”

  Dr. Horace Naismith had founded the First Bank of Religiosophy in Bad Ass, Texas, because he wanted to be sure nobody in the Establishment would take it seriously.

  It was his plan to undermine the Federal Reserve System without their noticing what was happening.

  Everything in Bad Ass was considered too absurd and repugnant for serious consideration. Bad Ass Township and the whole of Bad Ass County were a source of national embarrassment.

  Bad Ass had been founded by descendants of the famous Jukes and Kallikak families, carriers of virulent idiocy genes, together with a few Snopeses who had been driven out of Mississippi for unnatural acts.

  The Bad Ass School Board banned not only Evolution and Sex Education, but non-Euclidean geometry, the metric system, cultural anthropology, and all history texts written outside Texas.

  Despite the President, the Supreme Court, Congress, the TV networks and Jack Anderson, the Bad Ass County Line still bore the traditional sign: DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU IN BAD ASS, NIGGER. All roads leading to Bad Ass Township were littered with the decomposing bodies of murdered civil rights workers.

  Everybody in Unistat was profoundly ashamed of Bad Ass and wished it were part of some other country. They never realized that, to the rest of the world, Unistat looked like Bad Ass County.

  President Fuller, the man whose money ideas had inspired Dr. Naismith, was the only President in the history of Unistat to resign from office.

  He had resigned only three months after taking office, and he did it on the radio. “I simply can’t find any way to do anything socially useful here,” he said with that innocent sincerity that had charmed the voters into electing him. “I listened to some well-meaning friends and ran for this office,” Fuller went on, “and I now realize I was a perfect damned fool. The synergetic interlock or real time vectors in Universe cannot be augmented from here.”

  The people—and, even more, the other politicians—were outraged. They called Fuller a mugwump an
d wanted to punish him. Unfortunately, the only way to punish a politician is to refuse to vote for him, and Fuller was no longer a politician and refused to run for any office, so they had to be satisfied with just calling him a nut.

  That was in the 1930s, and everybody forgot about Fuller until the 1960s, when it turned out that his hobby—odd geometries—had a lot of practical applications.

  But still nobody took Fuller’s money theories seriously, except Dr. Naismith, and Eve Hubbard, who had run for President in 1980 on the Libertarian Immortalist ticket (“An End to Death and Taxes!”).

  There was another President of Unistat who resigned, actually, but he “only” (as they say) existed in a novel. This was a science-fiction thriller set in a parallel universe and was called Wigner’s Friend. It was about the worst possible President the author, a Harvard professor named Leary, could imagine.

  The President in Leary’s book, called Noxin, was a monster. He got the country into totally unnecessary wars without the consent, and sometimes even without the knowledge, of Congress. He lied all the time, compulsively, even when it wasn’t necessary. He put wiretaps on everybody—even on himself. (Leary, a psychologist, claimed this bizarre fantasy, which smacked of satire, was possible, for a certain type of paranoid mind.) He used the FBI and the IRS to harass every citizen who resisted this tyranny. He not only took bribes, but even had a team of enforcers who extorted “campaign” money from corporations under threat of turning the IRS on them. His political enemies all died in a series of strange assassinations that couldn’t be explained. When Congress started investigating his crimes, he betrayed his own co-conspirators one by one.

  Noxin even misappropriated government money to fix up his house, and cheated on his income tax.

  The book was a runaway best-seller, because it had a taut, suspenseful plot and because Unistaters could congratulate themselves on not being dumb enough to ever elect such a President.

  Naismith, despite his Texas accent, was no imbecile; he had his finger on part of what was really going on.

  The Federal Reserve did create money out of nothing. So did all the other banks.

  The laws of Unistat allowed this, by permitting banks to issue loans up to as much as eight times the amount they had in deposits. Every time a bank made a loan on money they didn’t actually have, they were creating money.

  Most of the people who knew about this (aside from the bankers) went paranoid worrying about it. This was because they did not realize how much of their Reality was created in similarly occult ways.

  The Federal Reserve made it possible for other banks to loan what they didn’t have. The Fed “guaranteed” the credit of the banks.

  The Fed was able to make this guarantee because it had lots of credit itself, in the form of government bonds.

  The government bonds were good because they were guaranteed by loans from the Fed.

  The loans from the Fed were guaranteed because the government gave them bonds.

  And this was safe, because the bonds (remember) were guaranteed by the Fed.

  That’s why Clem Cotex laughed for half an hour when he finally figured out the Unistat economy.

  The Communists had instituted this monetary policy because it made virtually all commerce dependent on money that didn’t exist.

  The Communists had abandoned pure Marxism in 1904 and were now following a system based partly on Marx and partly on traditional shamanism.

  The whole Communist movement had secretly been taken over, in 1904, by General E. A. Crowley, the famous explorer. Crowley had learned a lot from the tribal shamans in the “backward” parts of the world he frequented. Chiefly, he had learned that the universe is created by the participation of its participants.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was hand-picked by General Crowley to manage the Communist takeover of Unistat. Crowley picked Roosevelt chiefly because of his radio voice. The agreement was simple: Crowley would keep Roosevelt supplied with women—“That crip Casanova never gets enough,” he was soon complaining—and Roosevelt, in turn, introduced Nasrudin’s magic wand to political economy.

  Even though many clear-sighted, patriotic citizens saw through Roosevelt and warned, repeatedly, that he was leading the country to communism, the majority paid no heed to these voices of reason. They were charmed by Roosevelt’s radio voice, as Crowley had predicted.

  Actually, Roosevelt kept before him, every time he spoke on radio, a large sign with a wise saying attributed to the man who won the Bad Ass Hog Calling Contest in 1923. The sign said:

  YOU’VE GOT TO HAVE APPEAL AS WELL AS POWER IN YOUR VOICE. YOU MUST CONVINCE THE SWINE THAT YOU HAVE SOMETHING FOR THEM.

  Unfortunately, Roosevelt was assassinated by a disgruntled office seeker in 1937.

  The Communists found an equally loyal servant in 1948, however, in the famous General Douglas MacArthur, who was a military genius with one fatal flaw: he had an ego so large that only by contemplating the mathematical definition of infinity could anything so limitless be imagined.

  MacArthur completed the Communization of Unistat in return for having his picture put on pennies, nickels, dimes, dollars, postage stamps, paintings in every public place, G.I.-issue condoms, the ceilings of barber shops, Mount Rushmore, the Sistine Chapel frescoes (advising God during the Creation), all government documents, the chief balloon in all Macy’s parades, in place of the test pattern on TV screens, marriage licenses, dog licenses, and in various other places that he thought of from time to time.

  A brave and patriotic senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, attempted to expose MacArthur’s government, which was staffed entirely by card-carrying Communists. (The Communists carried cards because, with so many conspiracies going on at the time, it was the only way they could identify themselves to one another.) The senator was smeared by the press, censured by his colleagues, and hounded to an early grave.

  “Ike” Eisenhower, a popular Western film star of the period, contributed to McCarthy’s demise by making a national tour supporting the President.

  “I don’t know anything about politics or military strategy,” old “Ike” would tell audiences, his face full of stupid sincerity. “But I know General MacArthur is a smart man and a tough man and can outfox the Commies every time.”

  Like almost everybody else, “Ike” thought the Communists had taken over Russia, not Unistat.

  One of the most insidious things the CIA Communists did when they took over Unistat was to change the Constitution.

  The original Constitution, having been written by a group of intellectual libertines and Freemasons in the eighteenth century, included an amendment which declared:

  A self-regulated sex life being necessary to the happiness of a citizen, the right of the people to keep and enjoy pornography shall not be abridged.

  This amendment had been suggested by Thomas Jefferson, who had over nine hundred Black concubines, and Benjamin Franklin, a member of the Hell Fire Club, which had the largest collection of erotic books and art in the Western world at that time.

  The Communists changed the amendment to read:

  A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged.

  All documents and textbooks were changed, so that nobody would be able to find out what the amendment had originally said. Then the Communists set up a front organization, the National Rifle Association, to encourage the wide usage of guns of all sorts, and to battle any attempt to control guns as “unconstitutional.”

  Thus, they guaranteed that the murder rate in Unistat would always be the highest in the world. This kept the citizens in perpetual anxiety about their safety both on the streets and in their homes. The citizens then tolerated the rapid growth of the Police State, which controlled almost everything, except the sale of guns, the chief cause of crime.

  THE BACHS’ BOX

  The Wilhelm Friedemann Bach Society was in the same downtown Washington building as the Wa
rren Belch Society and the Invisible Hand Society, but Clem Cotex never thought much about them. He assumed, as did everybody else who noticed the name on the building directory, that the W. F. Bach Society was just a group of musicologists.

  Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  They were also trying to find out “what the hell is really going on.”

  This odd fraternity had named themselves after W. F. Bach not just for his music, which was superb, but for his effrontery, which was even more superb. Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, one of the twenty children of Johann Sebastian Bach, did not have the easy and immediate success of his brothers, Johann Christian Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. In fact, because he was original and because he had to compete with the other three Bachs (already well established in the esteem of music lovers), Wilhelm Friedemann was neglected for a long time and might have ended his days in poverty and obscurity. But W. F. Bach was not the sort of man to take defeat easily. He hit on a plan which caused his music to be played everywhere, and made him quite a bundle of Deutschmarks, even though people were still saying he was the least important of the Bachs.