Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  Justin Case was not verbally oriented; he thought in pictures, as a good film critic should. He never asked whether the war was “good” or “evil.” It was unaesthetic.

  The people who had mined Unistat with nuclear bombs had not regarded the Vietnam War as unaesthetic. They thought it was downright evil.

  They thought just about everything the Unistat alpha males—in corporations and governments—did was evil.

  They thought most of their fellow primates were no-good shits.

  Justin Case had been born blissfully by a joyous mother schooled in the Grantly Dick-Read method of natural childbirth.

  By the time Justin was thirty-six years old, in 1983, the Dick-Read method was as obsolete as the horse and buggy. Things were moving fast on Terra in that age.

  Nonetheless, the Dick-Read natural childbirth yoga was good for its time, and Case had a permanent security imprint on the oral biosurvival circuitry of his brain. That was one reason he never worried about ethical issues.

  When Justin began to crawl about the house and then rose up to walk up and down in it, his father, a former alpha male with a large corporation now on the skids due to booze, found him a pest and a nuisance. Father disappeared rapidly, pursued by lawsuits and child maintenance liens, which harassed him so much that he drank even more, earned less, and was first chronically and then permanently incapable of paying a blessed penny to Justin and Justin’s Mommy.

  Justin was not genetically programmed to be an alpha male, but under the circumstances he learned to do a good imitation of one.

  “Mommy’s Great Big Man,” Mommy called him.

  The anal-territorial (old primate) section of Justin’s brain took an imprint of Pretend-Authority.

  Then Justin discovered the semantic environment. He learned to read and watch TV. The books seemed clumsy and sententious compared to the immediacy of the tube. He took a visual-electronic imprint on the semantic circuit, like most of his generation.

  Case’s sociosexual circuit was imprinted by Playboy, Sexual Revolution, weed, Rock, yippies, protest, the Generation Gap, Women’s Lib, and General Confusion. He was a bachelor who had heterosexual couplings as often as he felt the need, with the minimum possible human involvement.

  If you’re interested in superficialities, he looked like a gay intellectual or a college professor or a little bit of both. He already had a bald spot. He dressed in conservative good taste. And every four years he went to a polling booth and carefully printed with a heavy felt-tip pen, “NONE OF THE ABOVE.”

  This was his one flicker of Social Consciousness.

  Case had one Weird Experience in his whole life. It happened in 1973 when he went to see the famous mentalist, psychic, escape artist, and comedian Cagliostro the Great, at a nightclub called Von Neumann’s Catastrophe.

  Cagliostro began his act with a few traditional tricks—being locked in one box and then reappearing out of another at the opposite side of the room, that kind of routine. This was followed by one of his bitingly sarcastic monologues about the tricksters in other professions, such as the clergy and the government. This was all as Case had expected from the Most Controversial Magician in Show Biz history. Then came the psychic stunts, which were sometimes frighteningly impressive.

  “B.W.,” Cagliostro called out. “Will you please stand up?” Case saw the unbearable bore, Blake Williams, standing at a ringside table.

  “B.W.,” Cagliostro repeated, “you will never finish your twelve-volume study of quantum psychology. Not ever, in this universe. The twitches in your leg from the polio can be cured by Valerian Root tea. The incident at the Vandivoort Street incinerator is still haunting you. Your investments are all wrong—there’s no future in space industry. And as for Project Pan, Doctor—Project Pan—naughty, naughty, naughty!”

  Case could see that Williams had turned pale.

  “J.C.,” Cagliostro called out suddenly, “don’t stand. This is private.” Justin Case squirmed, half-afraid, half-skeptical, totally vulnerable. “J.C.,” Cagliostro repeated, “you have created this movie that you call reality. Stay out of Chinatown….

  “S.M.,” the magician went on, “S.M., about the Beast, now … that’s in your future….”

  POE

  Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

  —POE

  In July 1968, immediately after the Democratic Convention, held behind barbed wire to prevent the people from interfering in their own affairs, a letter appeared in The Seed, a Chicago radical newspaper. The letter said:

  Brothers and Sisters:

  The final struggle is upon us. The big racist-imperialist forces that control Amerika have taken off their fake “liberal” mask and shown their true fascist nature. Look at the record: the assassinations of John and Bobby and Martin Luther King. The unending war against the people of Vietnam. The brutalities of the local police, right on television with the whole world watching, during the recent Demokratic Convention. Is it not obvious that the multinational corporations no longer even care to pretend that democracy still exists and are ready to kill us to the last man and woman if we continue to resist?

  Weather Underground has chosen the wrong path, romantically allowing themselves to be known and defying the authorities to catch them.

  We of POE have organized quietly. Our numbers are not for publication, nor our identities. We will not take “credit” for our actions, unlike the Weather romantics. We will not recruit new members. We will send no further communiqués to the press. We will work and study to strike the most crippling blows possible against the fascist monster.

  If you agree with us, do not seek to find us and join us. Do as we have done.

  Peace On Earth.

  John Brown

  Some readers of The Seed thought this was a put-on. Others claimed it was the work of an FBI agent provocateur. A few wondered if POE actually existed, and what it would do.

  Everybody, of course, assumed that the initials POE stood for the slogan in the last line of the letter—“Peace On Earth.” They were wrong. POE stood for “purity of essence.” The group had deliberately taken as their model General Jack D. Ripper in the film Dr. Strangelove, who launches a nuclear war to protect “the purity of essence of our precious bodily fluids” against fluorides. POE honestly felt that sanity had failed to save the world and that only insanity remained as a viable alternative.

  Nor were they alone in this attitude. The same year POE was formed, the American people elected Richard Milhous Nixon to the White House, guided by a similar gut-level feeling that somebody like Jack D. Ripper was needed to confront the growing chaos of the planet with some strong counterchaos.*

  The real name of the founder of POE was not “John Brown” of course. That was a pseudonym.

  The original John Brown had been a fervent Idealist, which was why POE admired him. They were all fervent Idealists too.

  John Brown, motivated by Idealism, had set out to abolish slavery in Unistat in the nineteenth century. On one of his first raids he murdered a whole family of slave owners. An associate, who was less Idealistic, had suggested sparing the children, but John Brown refused.

  “Nits grow up to be lice” he said.

  Idealists were like that. You were much safer falling into the hands of the Cynics. The Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt. That was the attitude for instance, of Tobias Knight and the other old hands at the FBI.

  The Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.

  The six-legged majority on Terra had never developed Idealism or Cynicism, nor had they ever thought of sin or corruption. They had a simple, pragmatic outlook. People could be recognized because they all had six legs. Good people smelled right and were part of the same hive or colony. Bad people smelled wrong and were not part of the hive; they should be eaten at once, or driven off.

  Two-legged and four-legged critters weren’t people at all and to hell with them.

  The four-legged residents of Terra were, for the
most part, equally simpleminded. People had four legs. Six-legged critters were food, or else they were not worth noticing. Two-legged critters were dangerous, and should be avoided.

  Only the dogs, among all the four-legged Terrans, recognized the two-legged primates as being people.

  Some of the primates also recognized the dogs as being people.

  One-tenth of one percent of the domesticated primates recognized all the life-forms on their planet as people.

  The one-tenth of one percent of the primates who recognized non-primates as people were in violent disagreement with each other about everything else. About one-third of them were Mystics and suffered from Permanent Brain Damage brought on by fasting, yoga, or other masochistic practices. They had attained understanding of the Intelligence of all living beings through an ecstatic-agonizing experience of ego loss brought on by their masochistic excesses. They went around talking about this genetic Intelligence and calling it “God” and telling everybody it was too smart to make mistakes and incidentally talking a lot of nonsense, also brought on by their excesses.

  Another third of the primates who recognized consciousness wherever it existed were specially trained scientists, in fields like ethology, ecology, biophysics, and Neurologic. They all talked in specialized jargons and hardly anybody could understand them. Most of them couldn’t even understand one another.

  The last third of the primates who had a sense of the genetic program behind evolution were folk who had eaten some strange chemicals or vegetables. They were like the blind Denebian shell cats who suddenly encounter water for the first time by falling into an ocean. They knew something was happening to them, but they weren’t sure what it was.

  POE theoretically had no leader. It was an anarcho-Marxist collective.

  The real leader was, of course, an alpha male. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart, and he was one of the smartest men in Unistat at that time. Unfortunately, his reptile biosurvival circuit was imprinted with chronic anxiety, his mammalian emotional-territorial circuit was imprinted with defensive aggression, his hominid semantic circuit was imprinted with an explosive blend of Black street cynicism and New Left ideology, and his domesticated sociosexual circuit was from Kinksville.

  F.D.R. Stuart claimed that the purpose of POE was to accelerate the dialectical process of evolution toward the classless society where all would live in peace, prosperity, and socialist solidarity, and there would be no cops.

  The real purpose of Stuart’s activities was to get even. The other primates in Unistat had raped his mother and jailed his father and driven his brothers and sisters into street crime and junk and generally maltreated him all his life. In addition they called him by an insulting name, which was nigger.

  Second in command in POE was Sylvia Goldfarb, a refugee from God’s Lightning, NOW, the Radical Lesbians, and Weather Underground. She was even smarter than F.D.R. Stuart, but she deferred to him, despite her feminist orientation, because he was a true alpha male who was a Mean Motherfucker When Crossed and had even more rage in him than she did.

  To Sylvia, the purpose of POE, she said, was to create a world where all men and women, all races and all classes, all humanity, lived in loving harmony and ate uncooked fruits and vegetables.

  Her real motive was also to get even. The other primates discriminated against her for being female, for being Jewish, for being highly verbal and a Teacher’s Pet, for wearing glasses, for being an atheist, and for several dozen other reasons at least. They also called her by an insulting name, which was dyke.

  The third founding member was Mountbatten Babbit, who was a cyclical schizophrenic. He wigged out once a year, on the average, and had learned how to medicate himself with phenothyazines to keep those periods of Bizarresville down to a few weeks each, but during those dilations of ego he was likely to be anybody from Napoleon to a Vietnamese Buddhist. The rest of the year he was a brilliant research chemist and computer expert, but it was hard for him to get a good job because of his several incarcerations in mental hospitals.

  Babbit said he was in POE to create a rational world guided by sound scientific and libertarian-socialist principles. Yeah, he wanted to get even too. The other primates called him a nut or a fruitcake.

  The other members of POE were equally brilliant and equally desperate.

  *Galactic Archives: At the time of this story the Unistat government had 1,700 atomic bombs for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Since a person can die only once, historians have been at a loss to explain what the Unistaters expected to do with the surplus 1,699 bombs for each human being. Galactical primatologists inform us that similar irrational behavior has been observed among domesticated apes on several thousand planets.

  THE HIDDEN VARIABLE

  Markoff Chaney was a prime candidate for POE but, due to quantum wave probabilities, his orbit never intersected theirs.

  Chaney detested the majority of primates because they called him Shorty or even more insulting names.

  Mr. Chaney, you see, was a midget, but he was no relative of the famous Chaneys of Hollywood. People did keep making jokes about that. It was bad enough to be, by the standards of the gigantic and stupid majority, a freak; how much worse to be so named as to remind those big oversized clods of cinema’s two most famous portrayers of monstro-freaks. By the time the midget was fifteen, he had built up a detestation for ordinary mankind that dwarfed (he hated that word) the relative misanthropies of Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria, Swift of Dublin, or anybody in POE. Revenge, for sure, he would have. He would have revenge.

  It was in college (U.C.-Berkeley, 1962) that Markoff Chaney discovered another hidden joke in his name. It was in a math class and, since this was Berkeley, the two students directly behind the midget were ignoring the professor and discussing their own intellectual interests—which were, of course, five years ahead of intellectual fads elsewhere.

  “So we keep the same instincts as our primate and pre-primate ancestors,” one student was saying. (He was from Chicago, his name was Mounty Babbit, and he was crazy even for Berkeley.) “But we superimpose culture and law on top of this. So we get split in two, dig? You might say”—Babbit’s voice betrayed pride in the aphorism he was about to unleash—“mankind is the statutory ape.”

  “… and,” the professor, Percy “Prime” Time, said at just that moment, “when such a related series appeared in a random process, we have what is known as a Markoff Chain. I hope Mr. Chaney won’t be tormented by jokes about this for the rest of the semester, even if the related series of his appearances in class does seem part of a notably random process.” The class roared; another tone of bile was entered on the midget’s shit ledger, the list of people who were going to eat turd before he died.

  In fact, his cuts were numerous, both in math and in other classes. There were times when he could not bear to be with the giants, but hid in his room. Pussycat centerfold open, masturbating and dreaming of millions and millions of nubile young women all built like Pussyettes, all throwing themselves passionately upon him. Today, however, Pussycat would avail him not; he needed something raunchier. Ignoring his next class, he hurried across Bancroft Way and slammed into his room, chain-bolting the door behind him.

  Damn “Prime” Time and damn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the square, the average, the measurable world that pronounced him subnormal. Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul, he declared war on the statutory ape, on law and order, on predictability. He would be the random factor in every equation; from this day forward, unto death, it would be civil war: the midget versus the digits.

  He took out his pornographic Tarot deck, which he used when he wanted a really far-out fantasy for his orgasm, and shuffled it thoroughly. Let’s have a Markoff Chain orgasm, just to start with, he thought savagely.

  His first overt act—his Fort Sumter, as it were—began in San Francisco the following Saturday. He was in Norton’s Emporium, a glorified five-and-dime st
ore, when he saw the sign:

  NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR

  WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR.

  THE MGT.

  What, he thought, are the poor girls supposed to pee in their panties if they can’t find the superior? Years of school came back to him (“Please, sir, may I leave the room, sir?”). Hah! Not for nothing had he spent a semester in Professor “Sheets” Kelly’s intensive course on textual analysis of modern poetry. The following Wednesday, the midget was back at Norton’s and hiding in a coffee urn when the staff left and locked up. A few moments later the sign was down and an improved version hung in its place:

  NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR

  OR LOOK OUT THE DOOR

  WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR.

  THE MGT.

  Markoff Chaney launched what he considered a reign of terror against the oversized idiots of the statistical majority. An electronics whiz since his first junior Edison set, he found it easy to reverse relays in street intersections, so that the WALK sign flashed on red and the DON’T WALK signs on green. This proved to be bereft of amusement, except in small towns; denizens of New York, Chicago, and similar elephantine burgs, accustomed to nothing working properly, ignored the signs anyway. The midget branched out and soon incomprehensible memos signed “THE MGT.” were raining upon employees everywhere.

  His father, crusty old Indole Chaney, had been a stockholder in Blue Sky Inc., a very dubious corporation manufacturing devices for use in low gravity; when John F. Kennedy announced that the U.S. would place a man on the moon before 1970, Blue Sky suddenly began to haul in the long green. Markoff inherited a fund that delivered $300 per month. For his purposes, it was enough. Living in Spartan fashion, constantly crisscrossing the country by Greyhound (he soon knew every graffito in every White Tower men’s room by heart), dining often on a tin of sardines and a container of milk, Markoff left a train of anarchy in his wake.