“THE MAN’S EITHER A GENIUS OR JESUS.”
—Sounds
ROBERT ANTON WILSON
Author of
SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT TRILOGY
“The most reasonable, intelligent, sophisticated and subtle analysis of the world’s madness ever seen in print.”
—Playboy
“The most scientific of all science novels.”
—New Scientist
“The man’s glittering intelligence won’t let you rest. First he shocks, then enlightens the readers. One is never the same after reading him. With each new book I welcome his wisdom, laced with his special brand of crazy humor.”
—Alan Harrington
“Speaks for that tiny but indispensable minority who are changing our world by changing the way we think about it.”
—Robert Shea, co-author of
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Also available from Dell
THE ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY (with Robert Shea)
MASKS OF THE ILLUMINATI
REALITY IS WHAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH
to the real Miss Portinari
Preface to the 1988 edition
There is a Glossary at the back of this book which explains many of the concepts of quantum mechanics employed in the text. The reader may find this helpful, and it may be consulted at any point when elucidation seems needed.
The story herein is set in a variety of parallel universes in which most of the politicians are thieves and most of the theologians are maniacs. These universes have nothing in common with our own world, of course.
Of course.
CONTENTS
Book One
The Universe Next Door
Book One
The Trick Top Hat
Book One
The Homing Pigeons
Glossary
BOOK ONE
The Universe Next Door
Not until the male become female and the female becomes male shall ye enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
—Jesus, in
The Gospel of Thomas
PART ONE
PURITY OF ESSENCE
For the Cherub Cat is a term in the Angel Tiger
—CHRISTOPHER SMART, Jubilate Agno
DON’T LOOK BACK
History is a nightmare from which none of us can awaken.
—STEPHEN PROMETHEUS IN CARL JUNG’S Odysseus
The majority of Terrans were six-legged. They had territorial squabbles and politics and wars and a caste system. They also had sufficient intelligence to survive on that barren boondocks planet for several billions of years.
We are not concerned here with the majority of Terrans. We are concerned with a tiny minority—the domesticated primates who built cities and wrote symphonies and invented things like tic-tac-toe and integral calculus. At the time of our story, these primates regarded themselves as the Terrans. The six-legged majority and other life-forms on that planet hardly entered into their thinking at all, most of the time.
The domesticated primates of Terra referred to the six-legged majority by an insulting name. They called them “bugs.”
There was one species on Terra that lived in very close symbiosis with the domesticated primates. This was a variety of domesticated canines called dogs.
The dogs had learned to achieve a rough simulation of guilt and remorse and worry and other domesticated primate characteristics.
The domesticated primates had learned how to achieve simulations of loyalty and dignity and cheerfulness and other canine characteristics.
The primates claimed that they loved the dogs as much as the dogs loved them. Still, the primates kept the best food for themselves. The dogs noticed this, you can be sure, but they loved the primates so much that they forgave them.
One dog became famous. Actually he and she was a group of dogs, but they became renowned collectively as Pavlov’s Dog.
The thing about Pavlov’s Dog is that he or she or they responded mechanically to mechanically administered stimuli. Pavlov’s Dog caused some of the domesticated primates, especially the scientists, to think that all dog behavior was equally mechanical. This made them wonder about other mammals, including themselves.
Most primates ignored this philosophical challenge. They went about their business assuming that they were not mechanical.
The fact that plutonium was missing originally leaked to the press in the mid-1970s. At first there was a minor wave of panic among those given to worrying about such matters, and there was even some churlish grumbling about a government so incompetent that it couldn’t keep track of its own weapons of megadeath.
But then a year passed, and another, and soon five years had passed, and then nearly a decade; and the missing plutonium was still missing but nothing really drastic had happened.
Terran primates, being a simpleminded, sleepful race, simply stopped worrying about the subject. The triggering mechanism of the most destructive weapon ever devised on that backward planet was in unknown hands, true; but that was really not much more unsettling to contemplate than the fact that many of the known hands which had enjoyed access to plutonium belonged to persons who were not in all respects reasonable men. (See Terran Archives: Reagan, Ronald Wilson, career of.)
The primate philosophy of that epoch was summed up by one of their popular heroes, Mr. Satchel Paige, in the aphorism, “Don’t look back—something might be gaining on you.” It was a comfortable philosophy for sleep-loving people.
The use of atomic weapons was widely blamed on a primate named Albert Einstein. Even Einstein himself had agreed with this opinion. He was a pacifist and had suffered abominable pangs of conscience over what had been done with his scientific discoveries.
“I should have been a plumber,” Einstein said just before he died.
Actually the discovery of atomic energy was the result of the work of every scientist, craftsman, engineer, technician, philosopher, and gadgeteer who had ever lived on Terra. The use of atomic energy as a weapon was the result of all the political decisions ever made, from the time the vertebrates first started competing for territory.
Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a single cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited.
They also gave themselves, and one another, more blame than was deserved when things went badly. This gave them all jumbo-sized guilt complexes.
It is usually that way on primitive planets, before quantum causality is understood.
Quantum causality was not understood on Terra until physicists solved the Schrödinger’s Cat riddle.
Schrödinger’s Cat never became as famous among the primate masses as Pavlov’s Dog, but that was because the cat was harder to understand than the dog.
Pavlov’s Dog could be understood in simple mechanical metaphors. To understand Schrödinger’s Cat you needed to first understand the equations of quantum probability waves. Only a few primates were smart enough to read the equations, and even they couldn’t understand them.
That was because the equations seemed to say that the cat was dead and alive at the same time.
Every character in this book looks like Pavlov’s Dog from a certain angle. If you look at him or her a different way, however, you’ll see Schrödinger’s Cat.
As early as 1976, a group of Chicago paranoids known as the Nihilist Anarchist Horde (NAH) printed up a single-page broadside on how to manufacture an atomic weapon. They sent this, in envelopes with no return address, to all the most hos
tile and embittered individuals and groups in the United States. NAH regarded this mailing as both a joke and a warning, and refused to face the fact that it was also an incitement.
NAH had already put out bumper stickers saying things like:
REGISTER CAPITALISTS, NOT GUNS
and:
HONK IF YOU’RE ARMED
and:
EAT THE RICH
And they even had a rubber stamp which they used to decorate subway advertisements with the Nihilistic message: ARM THE UNEMPLOYED: RIOT IN THE LOOP ON NEW YEAR’S EVE.
But they really outdid themselves with the build-your-own atomic weapon sheet, which was titled “Hobbysheet #4” and looked like this:
HOBBYSHEET #4 in a series of 30. Collect ’em all!
A SIMPLE ATOMIC BOMB FOR
THE HOME CRAFTSMAN
There is nothing complex about an Atomic (or Fission) Bomb. If enough fission material (Uranium 235 or Plutonium 237) is brought together to form a critical mass, it will explode. The trick is to put the pieces together fast enough to get a decent blast before the bomb blows itself apart. This can be done quite simply by means of ordinary explosive as shown below.
It was later estimated that the Nihilist Anarchist Horde, most of whom were living on Welfare, were able to mail out only 200,000 of these over the four-year period (1976-80) before they grew bored with the project.
Nonetheless, many of the equally paranoid and hostile persons who received this mailing had access to Xerox machines and were as desperate as the members of NAH itself. It was later determined that by 1981 there were over 10,000,000 copies of “Hobbysheet #4” in circulation. Eventually one of them reached the POE group, who were ready for an idea like that.
The planet as a whole continued to drowse.
ALTERNATIVE TEXTS
That is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon sense.
—ERIC TEMPLE BELL,
Mathematics: Queen of the Sciences
GALACTIC ARCHIVES:
The original title of the greater part of what we have collected in this book under the title Schrödinger’s Cat was The Universe Next Door. The book of that name was begun as a sequel to Illuminatus!, but after several editors in a row suffered psychotic breakdowns while reading it, publishers defensively ordered that any ms. with that title, from Robert Anton Wilson, should be returned unopened.
“People generally do not want a new form of prose fiction to replace the hackneyed ‘novel,’” Wilson wrote in a letter to his friend Malaclypse the Younger. “There never has been a serious attempt since Odysseus.”
Schrödinger’s Cat Fair Copy #2, according to Wilson scholars, incorporates later and still more bizarre material, the text of which was allegedly dictated to Wilson by a canine intelligence—“vast, cool, and unsympathetic”—from the system of the Dog Star, Sirius. Schrödinger’s Cat Fair Copy #3 appeared much later, in 2031, under mysterious circumstances. Some claimed, at the time, that it had been received by a trance medium to whom Wilson had “broadcast” it after his melodramatic departure from this world in 1993. Skeptics have always insisted that the alleged medium actually found it in an old tampon box in her attic. A legend about the manuscript being recovered from the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, after the earthquake of 2005, and passed around among adepts of certain occult groups, is probably mythical.
Various alternative texts, generally considered forgeries, have circulated at intervals and many Wilson scholars debate heatedly whether this final ms. is, in fact, totally or even in major part Wilson’s work. That two authors at least are here represented, often at cross-purposes with each other, is the emerging academic consensus at this time.
The present edition incorporates all material that is undoubtedly Wilson’s, together with matter of such a Wilsonian and weird character that the present editor regards it as probably-Wilson’s-within-reasonable-doubt.
It only remains to affirm that Schrödinger’s Cat, contrary to appearances, is not a mere “routine” or “shaggy shoggoth story.” Despite his sinister reputation and his well-known eccentricities, Wilson was one of the last of the scientific shamans of the primitive, terrestrial phase of the cruel, magnificent Unistat Empire. This may be hard to understand when many Establishment scholars still deny that anything like scientific shamanism existed in the twentieth century, but it is nevertheless well documented that Wilson, Leary, Lilly, Crowley, Castaneda, and many others pursued rigorous studies in scientific shamanic research even under the persecution of the “neurological police” so characteristic of that barbaric epoch.* Some have even proposed that Schrödinger’s Cat is actually a manual of shamanism in the form of a novel, but that opinion is, almost certainly, exaggerated.
* See the Editor’s “Clandestine Neurotransmitter Research Under the Holy Inquisition and the D.E.A.,” Archives of General Archaeology, Vol. 23, No. 17.
ONE MONTH TO GO
Immature humorists borrow; mature humorists steal.
—MARK TWAIN
On December 1, 1983, Benny “Eggs” Benedict, a popular columnist for the New York* News-Times-Post, sat down to compose his daily essay. According to his usual procedure, he breathed deeply, relaxed every muscle, and gradually forced all verbalization in his brain to stop. When he had reached the void, he waited to see what would float up to fill the vacuum. What surfaced was:
One month to go to 1984.
Benny looked at the calendar; what happened next would be portrayed by a cartoonist as a light bulb flashing on over his head. He began pounding the typewriter, comparing the actual situation of the world with Orwell’s fantasy.
His column, headed “One Month to Go,” was read by nearly 10,000,000 people, the News-Times-Post being the only surviving daily paper available to the 20,000,000 citizens of the six boroughs of New York City. Nine million of the 10,000,000 readers were a little bit paranoid, this being the natural ecological result of crowding that many primates into such a congested space, and most of them agreed with the most pessimistic portions of Benedict’s estimation of Orwell’s accuracy as a prophet.
“One month to go to 1984” became a catchphrase to conclude or answer anybody’s complaint about anything. “One month to go to 1984”—soon you heard it everywhere; it reached Chicago by December 10, San Francisco by December 14, was even quoted in Bad Ass, Texas, on December 16.
By December 23 the London Economist printed a very scholarly article on world history from 1949, when Orwell’s book was published, to the present, enumerating dozens of parallels between Orwell’s fiction and the planet’s nightmare.
In Paris a prominent Existentialist, in an interview with Paris Soir, argued that living inside a book, even a book by an English masochist like Orwell, was better than living in reality. “Art has meaning but reality has none,” he said cheerfully.
The six-legged majority on Terra were never consulted when the domesticated primates set about building weapons that could destroy all life-forms on that planet. This was not unusual. The fish, the birds, the reptiles, the flowers, the trees, and even the other mammals weren’t allowed to vote on this issue. Even the wild primates weren’t involved in the decision to produce such weapons. In fact, the majority of domesticated primates themselves never had a say in the matter.
A handful of alpha males among the leading predator bands among the domesticated primates had made the decision on their own. Everybody else on the planet—including the six-legged majority, who had never been involved in primate politics—just had to face the consequences.
Most of the domesticated primates of Terra did not know they were primates. They thought they were something apart from and “superior” to the rest of the planet.
Even Benny Benedict’s “One Month to Go” column was based on that illusion. Benny had actually read Darwin once, in college a long time ago, and had heard of sciences like ethology and ecology, but the facts of evolution had never really registered on him. He never thought of himself as a prima
te. He never realized his friends and associates were primates. Above all, he never understood that the alpha males of Unistat were typical leaders of primate bands. As a result of this inability to see the obvious, Benny was constantly alarmed and terrified by the behavior of himself, his friends and associates and especially the alpha males of the pack. Since he didn’t know it was ordinary primate behavior, it seemed just awful to him.
Since a great deal of primate behavior was considered just awful, most of the domesticated primates spent most of their time trying to conceal what they were doing.
Some of the primates got caught by other primates. All of the primates lived in dread of getting caught.
Those who got caught were called no-good shits.
The term no-good shit was a deep expression of primate psychology. For instance, one wild primate (a chimpanzee) taught sign language by two domesticated primates (scientists) spontaneously put together the signs for “shit” and “scientist” to describe a scientist she didn’t like. She was calling him shit-scientist. She also put together the signs for “shit” and “chimpanzee” for another chimpanzee she didn’t like. She was calling him shit-chimpanzee.
“You no-good shit,” domesticate primates often said to each other.
This metaphor was deep in primate psychology because primates mark their territories with excretions, and sometimes they threw excretions at each other when disputing over territories.
One primate wrote a long book describing in vivid detail how his political enemies should be punished. He imagined them in an enormous hole in the ground, with flames and smoke and rivers of shit. This primate was named Dante Alighieri.
Another primate wrote that every primate infant goes through a stage of being chiefly concerned with biosurvival, i.e. food, i.e. Mommie’s Titty. He called this the Oral Stage. He said the infant next went on to a stage of learning mammalian politics, i.e. recognizing the Father (alpha male) and his Authority and territorial demands. He called this, with an insight that few primates shared, the Anal Stage.
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