Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  “All progress is made by violating taboos,” he went on presently. “A certain friend of mine ah made that observation many years ago.”

  “Blake Williams,” Tobias Knight said. “We know he’s in this up to his ears.”

  “A certain friend,” Dashwood went on, neither confirming nor denying. “He pointed out that without heretics and blasphemers—without rebels, that is—we would all still be living like Homo Erectus half a million years ago. All progress has been made by individuals who dared to think about the unthinkable and do the forbidden. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.’ Those who dare—”

  “Wilde was a Bryanting degenerate,” Knight growled. He was showing more of his canine teeth now: the signal of primate anger.

  “Those who dare cross the line—any line—are explorers, and explorers sometimes get lost,” Dashwood went on. “But without them, we never would have walked out of the tribal stage into the urban or out of the Dark Ages into the Renaissance.

  “But enough rhetoric. Let me come to the point.

  “Gentlemen, dozens of anthropologists have sat in this office and told me stories that once made my hair stand on end. And dozens, and scores, of parapsychologists have told me even wilder tales. Gentlemen, everybody outside Bad Ass or Seattle knows that the line between Experimental Music and Noise is very hard to find, that the line between avant-garde literature and nonsense is ambiguous, that even the line between the Beautiful and the Hideous is far from fixed, since a Ubangi woman with a plate in her lip is attractive to a Ubangi man, but absurd or repulsive to most of us. Mathematicians know that what constitutes proof is still not itself totally understood. Scientific Truth, so called, used to remain the same for millennia; then it began changing every century; in this century, it has changed every decade, or even quicker in some fields. And yet, in spite of all this, we think there is a firm, fixed, immutable boundary between the Real and the Unreal.

  “Gentlemen, there is no such boundary.

  “Everything that we regard as filthy, obscene, blasphemous, and disgusting is part of the ancient mind-science called Magick.”

  Dashwood smiled gently. “Sex with a menstruating woman is forbidden, and considered ‘indecent’ or appalling, because it was once part of the sacraments of the Moon Goddess cult. The menstruating woman was thought to be possessed by the Goddess, I suppose, but the theory doesn’t matter. Judeo-Christian civilization put the practice under a ban, and made it ‘evil,’ because it was part of the ancient Goddess religion that the worshipers of a Male God could not tolerate.

  “Homosexuality is forbidden and considered revolting and ugly because it was part of the tradition of shamanism in most parts of the world not included in the Judeo-Christian cult.

  “And yet, what do we find within the Judeo-Christian world itself? What do we find in the most orthodox times? We find secret cults using these forbidden acts for occult purposes. Sex with a menstruating woman was called ‘the mystery of the Red Gold’ by the alchemists, and was part of the process of consciousness expansion in that form of Magick. Homosexuality was part of the secret teachings of the Knights Templar and many other Magick cults.”

  “There are perverts everywhere,” Knight said. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  Dashwood smiled again. “Tell me,” he asked, “how do you feel after a good Potter Stewart?”

  “What does that prove?” Knight demanded.

  “Let us see where it leads us,” Dashwood said. “You feel good, do you not? Yes, you will agree to that much. How would you feel after Potter Stewarting for four hours?”

  Tired.

  “Not if you were trained in Tantra,” Dashwood said. “Tantrists have been known to continue the sexual act for far longer—eight hours, even. Is it not strange that Shakespeare referred to it as ‘the monetary trick,’ and Kinsey found, back in the forties, that the average Unistat male reaches Millett in less than two minutes? Is this not part of the Taboo I am discussing, the Taboo on the Magick secrets of non-Judeo-Christian religion? We have loosened up a lot since Kinsey’s day, but to a Tantrist we are still rushing and missing the little details, you might say. Why is that?”

  DeAct lit another cigarette. “Jesus,” he said, “are you telling us that every kind of sex that’s forbidden in the Bible is the key to some kind of occult knowledge or power? Is that it?”

  “A long time ago, when I wasn’t ready to understand yet,” Dashwood said, “a parapsychologist told me, ‘Scratch a trance medium and you’ll find a homosexual.’ That’s not one hundred percent true, but it’s true more often than not.

  “The Moon Goddess is a metaphor, let us say. But what happens to a woman in her menses, the power that is present and can be used in mind science, is no metaphor.

  “Now, what started Project Pan was something I discovered, by ‘accident’ as they say, just browsing in a book that didn’t seem to relate to my own work at all, a book on Egypt, and there it was: there was a priestess who performed fellatio on a goat every year on the Egyptian New Year’s Day, which is our July 23. Yes, gentlemen—in the vernacular, she gave the goat a Steinem Job.”

  “There are perverts everywhere,” Knight repeated.

  “This was central to the Egyptian religion,” Dashwood said. “Was the whole religion a perversion? Don’t you see, everything called perversion got that name because it was part of the old Magick tradition?

  “And guess what, gentlemen: What is the most common subject in the cave paintings left by our ancestors thirty thousand years ago?

  “Bestiality. Yes, gentlemen—our ancestors portrayed themselves, over and over, having sex with goats and bisons and every animal they knew about.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Knight said flatly.

  “Look it up sometime,” Dashwood said pleasantly. “It’s mentioned in Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, by Weston LeBarre, one of our most respected anthropologists. You never see those paintings in any popular books of cave art, but every paleoanthropologist knows about them.

  “You find the same in ancient Indian art, ancient Babylonian art, ancient art everywhere.

  “And you find the Magick secret coded into myth and legend over and over. The formula for producing a Man-God or Super-Hero is the mating of human and animal. Europa and the bull; Leda and the swan; Beauty and the Beast; the Buddha fathered by a white elephant in some versions of the legend.

  “Tantric sex is the portal of the mysteries, and the alchemists called it the secret of silver. This is the secret of gold, gentlemen. And it’s even coded into the Judeo-Christian mythos—after the Gnostics got through editing the manuscripts. Why do you think Eve and the Serpent are credited with giving us the knowledge of good and evil? Why does the Hebrew word for ‘serpent,’ neschek, have the same Cabalistic value as the word ‘Messiah’? Why is the Messiah born of the union of a woman with a bird? Can’t you read the message in the formula, animal-human-super-human?”

  “This is blasphemous and disgusting, as well as criminal,” Knight said. “You, Dr. Dashwood, are as crazy as a loon.”

  “Why do you feel ‘good’ during and after sex?” Dashwood went on. “Just nature’s way of tricking us into reproducing the species? Yes, that is part of it. But nature loves to economize, to do several things at once. You feel high and powerful because you are raising your mental energy—the Kundalini of the Hindu metaphor. With the proper ritual and proper training, the energy can be raised to the point where your Will and Imagination are illuminated with power and you can create a new Reality. Literally. You walk over the line between the state marked ‘real’ as far as you dare to go into the ‘unreal,’ and you make your new line. Until you have the courage to try again and go even farther out….”

  “Crazy as a loon,” Knight repeated.

  DeAct put out his cigarette and lit another. “I want to thank you, Dr. Dashwood,” he said formally, “for being so open with us and ah taking us into your confidence so fully. You will understan
d, of course, that we cannot ah buy your argument at ah first glance. It is startling and ah very unorthodox and ah that is, well, I’m sure the jury will understand, a brilliant mind and probably the factor of overwork and too much imagination.”

  Dashwood stood up. “I see,” he said. “Well, it’s time I tried it—the one experiment I was always afraid of.”

  “Grab him, Tobias!” DeAct shouted.

  But he was too late.

  Dashwood opened his mouth to its maximum extension, breathed in deeply, and then bellowed:

  “Gesundheit,” Knight said automatically. But Dashwood was gone from that universe.

  The sign said:

  CHAPEL PERILOUS

  PRICE OF ADMISSION: YOUR MIND

  S. MUSS SINE, PROPRIETOR

  Dashwood passed through the lavatory into the laboratory, where Patrick Knowles and Lon Chaney were turning switches and throwing relays wildly as Bela Lugosi, with Karloff’s old makeup, tried to pretend he was the Frankenstein monster, while Ilona Masey huddled in a corner, looking worried.

  It seemed that some refurbishing and rebuilding had been going on in the downtown area, for Union Square was much bigger than Dashwood remembered and there were several new buildings surrounding it, most of them built in hyperbolic and non-Euclidean curves. Chinatown was now facing directly onto the Square instead of being two blocks downhill and to the right, but there was a huge sign on the Chinatown Gate, saying:

  CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS

  FU MANCHU, PROPRIETOR

  Claude Shannon of Bell Laboratories and Tristan Tzara, the pioneer Dadaist, were picking random words out of people’s mouths as they passed and gluing them to a huge billboard where they had already formed the pseudosentence:

  AMERICAN LIFE BOMB WENT AUTHORITARIAN IN FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH AUTHOR

  “We’re discovering the information/redundance ratio in random signals,” Shannon explained, waving a program-able calculator.

  “We’re creating a new Art Form!” Tzara shouted.

  The Tin Woodman of Oz went by, with some of the boys from the Heavy Metal Mob.

  There were only two doors leading back out to the Bureau of Common Sense. One had a picture of Christ on the cross and bore the legend LOVE ONE ANOTHER; but the other had a picture of Captain Ahab and bore the legend I’D STRIKE THE SUN IF IT INSULTED ME.

  “Do I have to make a choice?” Babbitt asked. All this was going by too fast for him—one minute he was driving home from work and passed the billboard on Howard Street with the eye-on-the-pyramid, and the next minute he was in this place.

  The lights began to go out all over San Francisco, first in ones and twos, then in dozens and scores, and then in hundreds, until a stygian blackness descended in which Punk Rock groups and transvestites could be seen dimly as they marched in robot hordes toward the Bay.

  “UFOs over the power stations!” somebody shouted. “A major blackout!”

  And behind the Gate of Chinatown the drums of Fu Manchu began.

  The Punk Rock groups led the parade downhill, through Chinatown, to the Ocean.

  “Turn back, turn back!” screamed an effete intellectual snob. “The sea is NOT our home! Beware of the rising rivers of blood, beware of the Robot Animal Within. Turn back, turn back!”

  But the Punkers marched, and everybody fell in step behind them. First came the Ludes and the Creepers, then the Dirks and the Blunt Instruments, then more and more: the Problem of Anxiety, the Daggers, the Funny Farm, the Noon’s Repose, and the Troubled Midnight. And now it was not separate trickles, but one huge rushing stream: the Leapers, the Laughing Academy, the Foamix Culprits, the Mail Cover, Dr. Terror’s House of Ill Repute, the Keyhole Peepers, the Wire Tappers, the Whoopee Casket Company. And over the shrieks and howls of their music, from deep inside the hidden recesses of Chinatown, the drums of Fu Manchu grew louder.

  And more and more were coming, still: Dashwood recognized the Muggers, the Synthesizers, Moses and Monotheism, Reefer Madness, Crazy Artie’s Crisis Intervention Center, the Junior College of Cardinals, Totem and Taboo, the Things on the Doorstep, the Hoods, the Lanovacs, Six Flags over the Vatican, the Sleepers, the Beepers, the Roofers, the Cokers, the Thundering Hoofs, the Framis Stand, the Power to Cloud Men’s Minds, and the Croakers.

  Pickering’s Moon circled the Earth, going backward.

  And still the Punks came: the Chocolate Mouse, the Tax Writeoff, the Welfare Bums, the Primal Scream, Baphomet’s Witnesses, the Black Rabbit of Inlé, the Vegetables, the Fruits, the Nuts, the First Church of Satan Scientist, the Tantric Presbyterians, the Huns, the Creatures from the Back Ward, the Special Children, the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Looters, the Shooters, the Scooters, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy Revisited, the Thousand Kim, the Seeds of Discord, the Benton Harbor Rat-Weasel, the Bloodshot Pyramid, the Wascal Wabbits, Crescendo, the Diabolic Variations, Skinnerball, the Committee for the Elimination of Death, the Weird Made Flesh, the Poor Golems, the Wretched Refuse, the Alluminum Bavariati, the Double Helix, the Goons, the Thugs, the Teeming Shore, the Unnatural Act, the Solitary Vice, the Morose Delectation, the Wrist Slashers, the Window Jumpers, the Kryptonite Kids, the Stay-Free Mini-Pads, the Elect Cohens, the Corpse-Eaters of Leng, the Miniature Sled, the Hash Brownies, the Boston Blackies, Kadath in the Cold Waste, the Neanderthal Tails, the Giant Slugs, the Sloths, the Disadvantaged Youth, the Albert de Salvo Fan Club, the Dead Kennedys, the Molotov Cocktails, and, loudest and most eldritch of all, Great Cthulhu’s Starry Wisdom Band.

  And overall there was a smell of fried onions.

  Hierusalem, my happy home,

  When shall I come to thee?

  When shall my sorrows have an end,

  Thy joys when shall I see?

  Thy walls are made of precious stones

  Thy bulwarks diamonds square

  Thy gates are of bright orient pearl

  Exceeding rich and rare

  There trees for evermore bear fruit

  And evermore do spring;

  There evermore the angels sit

  And evermore do sing

  Ah, my sweet home, Hierusalem,

  Would God I were in thee!

  Would God my woes were at an end

  Thy joys that I might see

  It was dark in the room. His mother sang that song. She wore a perfume that smelled like lily-of-the-valley.

  Dashwood cut through an alley where two ancient Egyptian priestesses were leading a captured UFOnaut in chains past a Dog-Headed God.

  “Maybe Acid would help,” somebody muttered.

  SDATE YOUR BIZNIZ PLEEZ, the computer insisted. HOOKUP UZING IMPROVED EQUIPMEND TO AVOID FEEDBACK. SDAY TUNED.

  A Dominican monk marched past carrying a sign that said:

  JEWES WE KILLE

  TO SERVE GOD’S WILLE

  Strange messages were appearing on the computer console: SL LR MS ASK GREEN DREAMS TK X1826PCS M.Y.O.B. (MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS)

  Simon Moon seized the microphone and began a long, unintelligible speech about the Drug Problem. In each of our major cities, he seemed to be saying, there are thousands of people who desperately need dope. For all practical purposes these people simply cannot live unless they get “high.” He estimated the number of afflicted adults in the nation at well over 125,000,000, and said their habits included, but were not limited to, Valium, marijuana, Miltown, uppers, downers, acid, cigarettes, booze, aspirin, DMT, cocaine, peyote, and Coca-Cola. He called upon all concerned citizens to donate their surplus dope to a huge pile in the center of each city, to be called the Public Trough, from which the needy could take what was necessary to keep them functioning.

  The window next door lit up suddenly, showing an ancient Hindu princess in Tantric rapture with a UFOnaut.

  “Eternal Serpent Power,” Simon was ranting. “If we all raise the Kundalini at once, maybe we can get through the Dark Night of the Soul and see the Golden Dawn. Three A.M. is the worst of it—that’s the peak for UFO Contacts, murders, suicides, and B
ad Trips.”

  A brutal group of Cro-Magnons came over the hill and began clubbing Ancient Astronauts to death. The Cro-Magnons were tall, blond, and Aryan; the Astronauts had the blue skin of Krishna and Quetzalcoatl.

  A neon sign flashed:

  HALL OF SELF-LOVE

  THE AMERICAN DREAM ACHIEVED

  DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE

  LAW

  In the first room George Washington was holding a movie camera on Linda Lovelace as she masturbated and moaned, staring fixedly into the camera-eye. In the second room John Adams was holding a movie camera on Georgina Spelvin as she masturbated and moaned, staring fixedly into the camera-eye. In the third room Thomas Jefferson was holding a movie camera on Annette Haven as she masturbated and moaned, staring fixedly into the camera-eye. In the fourth room James Madison was holding a movie camera on Tina Russell as she masturbated and moaned, staring fixedly into the camera-eye.

  “What’s the use of revolution without general masturbation?” sang a Punk Rock group called Dr. Climax’s House of Dildos.

  In the fifth room James Monroe was holding a movie camera on Marilyn Chambers as she masturbated and moaned, staring fixedly into the camera-eye, so it would register every expression in her eyes, every involuntary twitch of pleasure around her mouth.

  A spastic handed Dashwood a leaflet headed “HELP EPILEPTICS LIVE AND WORK IN DIGNITY.”

  A girder fell on the one just man in San Francisco.

  Anarchists ran through the streets screaming, “Aux armes, citoyens! The government is taking over our country!”

  CLEAR FOR LAW-AND-ORDER DAY GREETING! blared the loudspeakers. FOLLOWING IS GREETING FOR LAW-AND-ORDER DAY.

  Cotton Mather, Cotton Hawes, and Cotton DeAct paraded past with a sign saying:

  YE POPE TO SHUNNE

  A BATTLE WUNNE

  A girder fell on an unjust man.