Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  “I think,” Percy “Prime” Time said, “that we were discussing Deep Mongolian Steinem Job and that got us into the subject of unusual combinations and permutations.”

  “Yes, yes, by God!” Williams exclaimed. “We realized that genius consists of looking for unusual combinations. Alekhine checkmates with a pawn, while his opponent is worrying about his queen. Beethoven proceeds from the third movement to the fourth without the usual break….”

  “And Shakespeare makes a powerful iambic pentameter line, one of his most tragic, out of the same word repeated five times,” Simon interjected.

  “And Picasso constructs a bull’s head, and a mighty sinister one,” Father Starhawk said, “from the handlebars and seat of a bicycle.”

  “And so,” Simon Moon cried triumphantly, “the unusual combination is the key to creative genius, and Tzara did find a mechanical analog to it in picking words from a hat at random. And Shannon formulated it mathematically when he realized that information is nothing but unexpected combinations—negative entropy in thermodynamics!”

  “Jesus, run that by me again,” Prime Time said faintly.

  But Blake Williams had the ideational ball and was running with it. “So Dada Art and cybernetics are both ways of playing games with thermodynamics, with the laws of probability,” he said. “By God, I’m becoming a mystic. The only way the universe or universes can survive is by continuous acts of creativity—unusual combinations—on some level or another. Schrödinger was right all along: life feeds on negative entropy. The mind feeds on negative entropy. The best favor you can do for anybody is to shock them, and no wonder the Zen Masters hit you with a stick when you least expect it; by God, any shock that’s severe enough is a new imprint….”

  “Imprint?” Professor Fred “Fidgets” Digits asked wanly.

  “A hard-wired circuit in the nervous system,” Williams said. “Imprints are created by shock. The birth process itself is the first shock and makes the first imprint. Haven’t you ever read ethology?”

  “You mean like a gosling imprints its mother, and if the mother isn’t right there it imprints some other white, round object like a Ping-Pong ball?” Digits said. “Yeah, I read that in Konrad Lorenz. Didn’t he win the Nobel for it?”

  “Well,” Williams said, “I’ve been wondering for years about the Hollandaise Sauce mystery—the people who were poisoned by contaminated Hollandaise once and then had a toxic reaction whenever they tried to eat Hollandaise. That’s an imprint, I decided. Being poisoned is uh you must admit a shock.”

  “Oh, wow,” Simon Moon said. “That’s like Dashiell Hammett’s story about the guy who almost got killed by a falling girder. All his imprints got extinguished. He just wandered off, forgetting is wife, his family, his job, and everything, looking for another Reality he could hook on to.”

  “Yes, yes,” Williams said. “You’re getting it. It happens to shipwrecked sailors and other people in isolation for long periods too. The imprints fade and whatever comes along makes a new imprint. It happens in Free Fall; that’s why all the astronauts come back mutated. And it happens at the first Millett too.”

  “Far Potter Stewarting out,” Simon said. “You mean, I dig red-haired women because my first Millett was with a red-haired girl in high school?”

  “You’ve got it,” Williams said. “If it had been a young um lady of color, you’d be one of those cats who only like to swing with Black chicks.”

  “If it had been with a boy,” Simon said, “I’d be Gay!”

  “That’s it, that’s it!” Clem Cotex cried. “If the Finkelstein multiworlds model in quantum mechanics is true, there are universes in which you did not take those imprints.”

  “Yeah,” Simon said. “I can see myself hanging around Gay bars in one universe, chasing Black foxy ladies in another…. My God, it’s probably true on the semantic circuits too. There might be a universe where I imprinted mathematics instead of words. I might be a physicist or a computer specialist over there instead of a novelist….”

  “And,” Father Starhawk said solemnly, “there might be a universe where, with a different set of emotional and semantic imprints, I might be a professional criminal, a jewel thief, or something.”

  There was a pause while everybody considered what they had been saying.

  “This is all rather speculative,” Fred Digits said finally. “We’re being carried away by our own rhetoric, I suspect.”

  “Um another thing,” Father Starhawk said. “People seem to be changing rather abruptly and in strange, unexpected ways lately. Those negative entropy connections and unusual combinations, you know? I mean, people who’ve been Straight all their lives and suddenly they’re Gay or Bi or something. And conservatives suddenly becoming liberals, as if all the semantic imprints are fading everywhere. Stable people schizzing out. Emotional neurotics suddenly becoming mature. It can’t all be the shocks of accelerating social change, can it?”

  Blake Williams beamed. “That’s the question I’ve been asking myself for months,” he said, “and I think I have the answer. Gentlemen, all the so-called recreational drugs that have come into wide use in the last few decades may be chemical shock devices. I think people are bleaching out their old imprints, and accidentally making new ones, when they think they’re just getting high and having fun.”

  “Wait a minute,” Simon said. “Isn’t there a guy in prison in California for the last twenty-seven years or so for saying that? Some psychiatrist named Sid Cohen or something?”

  “Never heard of him,” said Prime Time. “Besides, we don’t put people in jail in this country for their ideas.”

  “Well, anyway,” Simon said, “even if all these new imprints made with dope are more or less accidental and the people doing it don’t know what they’re doing actually, it sure has stirred up a lot of the creative energy we were talking about. New combinations—bizarre, unthinkable, taboo combinations—are forming in brains all over the world every few minutes. Maybe that’s why the Libertarian Immortalist Party could come out of nowhere and win the election by a landslide. ‘No more death and taxes.’ My God, who would have thought of it, twenty years ago?”

  After the meeting broke up Clem Cotex hung around the office awhile, bringing the files up to date, dusting the Venetian blinds, wondering why Dr. Hugh Crane, the most brilliant mind in the whole society, had been so quiet during this meeting, and also speculating idly about how the novel he was in was going to end.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come,” said Clem. He had picked that up from his hero, Captain (now Admiral) James T. Kirk, and he thought it was much classier than “Come in.”

  A small, brown, charismatic Puerto Rican opened the door. “Hugo de Naranja,” he said, introducing himself Continental fashion.

  “Clem Cotex,” Clem said. “What can I do for you?”

  “You investigate the eempossible, not so?”

  “Have a seat,” Clem said. “We investigate the Real,” he added, “especially those parts that the narrow-minded and mentally constipated regard as impossible, yes.”

  Hugo sat down. “I am initiate,” he said, “in Santaria. Also in Voudon. I am poet and shaman. I am also—how you say?—goan bananas over one meestery all my training in Magicko cannot explain. I theenk the Novelist play a treek on me.”

  “Oh, ah,” Clem said thoughtfully, “you’re aware that we’re living in a novel?”

  “Oh, si, is it not obvious?” Hugo smiled, one weathered quantum jumper to another. “You look at the leetle details, you see much treekery, no?”

  “Remind me to study this Santaria sometime,” Clem said. “It’s given you a broad perspective, I can see. Now, what’s your problem?”

  “Poetry, it earns no much the dinero,” Hugo said. “I work nights as watchman, to keep body and soul together. You know? So one night at the warehouse I see thees cat—thees son-of-a-beetch of a cat—and it is there and it is not there. You know?”

  “Oh, certainly,”
Clem said. “You should take Blake Williams’ course on quantum physics and neuropsychology.”

  “Son-of-a-beetch,” Hugo said. “I took that course, but I no pay attention much. Just to get the credit to get the degree. You know? I mees something important?”

  “Every modern poet and shaman should know quantum physics,” Clem said sternly. “Specialization is old-fashioned. You see, Señor de Naranja, what you encountered was Schrödinger’s Cat, and Schrödinger’s Cat is only in this novel part of the time.”

  NO LIMITS ALLOWED

  No limits allowed, no limits exist.

  —JOHN LILY, The Center of the Cyclone

  “The man from the FBI is here again,” Ms. Karrig said, “with a man from the District Attorney’s office.”

  Dr. Dashwood breathed deeply. “Send … them … in,” he said as calmly as he could, clicking off the intercom.

  He stared at the door for one frozen moment, still breathing deeply, relaxing every muscle; and then the door opened, and the two men came in.

  I could jump out of the window, Dashwood thought. But then he controlled himself.

  He recognized Tobias Knight at once, but the man from the D.A.’s office—who looked like a young Lincoln, or Henry Fonda playing young Lincoln—was a stranger.

  “Dr. Dashwood,” Knight said cordially, “this is Cotton DeAct, from the District Attorney’s office.”

  “Named after Cotton Mather?” Dashwood asked inanely.

  “Named after Cotton Hawes, the detective,” DeAct said, looking embarrassed. “My mother was a great mystery-story fan.”

  “Oh,” Dashwood said. There didn’t seem to be any other appropriate comment.

  There was a pause, and Dashwood noticed that Tobias Knight looked a bit embarrassed also.

  “Well, gentlemen,” he said heartily, “what can I do for you?”

  “Hrrrmph!” DeAct cleared his throat. “Dr. Dashwood,” he said formally, “there are two detectives from the Vice Squad waiting outside. They have a warrant for your arrest um for violating Section 666 of the revised criminal code ah Bestiality.” He was actually blushing.

  “I see,” Dashwood said. He realized that his breath had become shallow and his muscles were tensing; with an effort, he relaxed. “I’ve known this day might come,” he said with icy calm. “Why don’t they just come in and arrest me, then?”

  DeAct took a chair; Knight remained standing—between Dashwood and the window, although not being conspicuous about how he got himself there.

  “Well, ah,” DeAct said, lighting a cigarette nervously. “You are ah um an International Celebrity in a sense um people say Freud Kinsey Masters Johnson and Dashwood almost in one breath you might say. Ah there are questions of Scientific Freedom at stake here. Ah there is the matter of our national image ah we don’t want you to be called the American Sakharov or anything like that ha-ha right?”

  “Do you mean,” Dashwood cried, “you might offer me a deal?”

  “Well, I can’t speak with any authority on that,” DeAct said quickly. “What we have in mind is having you ah fill us in on the background details.”

  “You mean you want me to inform on my colleagues,” Dashwood said, not quite making a question of it.

  “No, no nothing like that,” DeAct said. “It’s hardly necessary, anyway. We know who they are and where they are, all sixty-seven of them.” He noted Dashwood’s reaction. “Yes,” he went on, “there is very little we don’t know about Project Pan, as you called it.”

  “Oh, Burger,” Knight said suddenly. “Let’s stop fiddle-Stewarting around. We’ve been on this investigation for over a year, Dashwood. We know that you and your friend Blake Williams somehow or other induced sixty-seven top scientific brains to get embroiled with you in this, this, this …” He blanched, and then went on brutally, “We know you’ve been Lourding animals, dammit! Lourding donkeys and Lourding goats and Lourding God-knows-what-else—whatever your Rehnquists would fit into, evidently. Jesus Christ,” he added, “I never heard of such a thing.”

  “That’s enough, Tobias,” DeAct said sharply. “You see our problem, Dr. Dashwood. Even in this age of sexual permissiveness and Free Scientific Inquiry, you seem to have crossed a line into very ah controversial territory, as well as being in violation of Section 666, the Bestiality law. What we want to know is”—he paused for a deep breath—“why did you do it, Doctor? And how in hell did you get so many important people involved?”

  “My God,” Dashwood said. “You really want to know the idea behind it all.”

  “Yes,” DeAct said. “Certainly. That’s our problem in a nutshell.”

  “I don’t go along with any of this, DeAct,” Knight said. “It’s just a case of degeneracy and perversion, and who cares what rationalizations they have?”

  “That’ll be enough, Tobias,” DeAct repeated.

  “I always say,” Knight went on, “‘Scratch a scientist and you’ll find an atheist, and scratch an atheist and you’ll find a goddamned Commie.’”

  “That will be enough, I said.”

  Dashwood was thinking. This was the old Mutt-and-Jeff routine: the tough, dumb cop who terrified you, and the smart, sympathetic cop who encouraged you to explain yourself. Still …

  “Very well,” he said. “I will attempt to explain Project Pan.”

  “You can call your lawyer before talking to us,” DeAct said hurriedly. “You can call a psychiatrist, too, if you want,” he added.

  “I am a psychiatrist,” Dashwood reminded him. Was DeAct worried about the Supreme Court and the international repercussions of putting sixty-eight top scientists on trial, or did he have some intuitive sense of the magnitude of what Project Pan was all about?

  “Can you take me seriously,” Dashwood spoke directly to DeAct, “if I tell you that what we have discovered here is the summum bonum, the secret of secrets, the key to the mystic powers of the ancients, the medicine of metals, the stone of the wise, the lost art of the Rosicrucians … that what you have been trained to consider most despicable is the central sacrament of existence, the key to higher consciousness and intelligence, the evolutionary imperative, the greatest scientific breakthrough to our epoch? Of course I always knew I would go to jail for it. I regard myself as lucky to live in an age when you won’t burn me at the stake.”

  DeAct lit another cigarette, avoiding Dashwood’s eyes. He mumbled, “You sound a bit grandiose, Doctor.”

  “This guy’s a schizo,” Knight said, more bluntly.

  “Let me begin at the beginning,” Dashwood said, ignoring Knight. “We are all primates. Do you understand that, gentlemen?”

  “Sure,” DeAct said. “Evolution. I had that in college.”

  “It’s just a theory,” Knight grumbled. “A man still has the right to believe in God in this country, you know.”

  Knight was rather overdoing the tough-cop routine, Dashwood thought.

  “It’s a biochemical fact,” Dashwood said, “that ninety-eight percent of our DNA is identical with chimpanzee DNA. Eighty-five percent of our DNA is identical with that of the South American spider monkey, our most distant relative in the primate family. That means, gentlemen, that most of our behavior is genetically programmed to follow the same survival, status, and sex programs as the other primates. We are only two percent different from the chimpanzee, and only fifteen percent different from the spider monkey. Think of that the next time you go to the zoo. Our cousins are looking out at us through the bars.

  “Now let me emphasize this, gentlemen. We suffer from certain induced cultural hallucinations. Every tribe brainwashes its children into the island-reality of the adults of the tribe; that’s the great discovery of Einstein in her principle of neurological relativism.

  “In our tribe—Western Christian civilization, as it’s called—we have brainwashed ourselves into not seeing and not thinking about our relationship to the other primates and to life in general. We know we are primates if we have gotten as far as college”—he emphasized
the last for Knight—“but we keep forgetting it, ignoring it, losing track of it.”

  “Bullburger,” Knight growled. It was a typical primate reaction in a threat situation, Dashwood thought.

  “Go on,” DeAct said nervously, lighting a third cigarette.

  “If I were to write a novel of about six hundred pages,” Dashwood said, “and mentioned on every one of the first four hundred pages that all of us are primates, we would find it funny or satirical. Even stranger, if I stopped mentioning it for about two hundred pages, the readers would all forget it quickly, and be startled if I mentioned it again on page five hundred fifteen. It’s a fact that all educated persons know, but most of us would rather forget or simply not think about.

  “Now, what is Bestiality, gentlemen?” Dashwood didn’t pause, but answered his own question. “Sexual relations between a human and an animal. But humans are animals, as we keep forgetting, so that definition is culturally biased and self-serving. Bestiality is sex between animals, that’s all. Interspecies sex. And any biologist will tell you that is quite common. Insects will Potter Stewart any bug that comes along if they can’t find their own species. The ubiquity of the mule, gentlemen, shows how common is the occurrence of interspecies sex—bestiality as our law calls it—between horses and donkeys. Throughout the reptile, bird, and fish kingdoms, the same behavior is commonplace.

  “There is no species on the planet, gentlemen, that thinks it is ‘degrading’ to have sex with another species—except ourselves. And that is because we are trying to forget that we are primates.”

  Dashwood paused.

  “This is some kind of put-on,” Tobias Knight said irritably. “Get to the point, Dashwood.”

  But DeAct was crushing out his cigarette with a thoughtfull frown. “So that’s your defense, then?” he asked. “Scientific inquiry and so on … You just wanted to find out the ah subjective similarities and differences in comparing Bestiality with ordinary sex and homosexuality and ah the other variations?”

  “Defense!” Dashwood exclaimed. “I am not defending myself. Whether defense is necessary at all remains to be seen. Right now, I am merely filling you in on the background as you requested.” He paused.