Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  He was, after graduation, ready for postgraduate work at Springfield, once he passed the admissions test, which consists of being captured by the police while in the possession of something hot. He was in possession of a Ford Mustang registered to a Mountbatten Babbit of Evanston. Postgraduate work at Springfield included a refresher course in sodomy and S-M, together with advanced study in grand larceny; but by this time F.D.R. Stuart had begun to doubt that the Stackerlee metaprogram contained the whole answer to life’s problems. A former Black Muslim, now a Sufi, was his cell mate, and taught him various things about the less-publicized qualities of the human nervous system.

  F.D.R. Stuart spent many hours staring at one wall of his cell, gradually creating a hole through which he could pass into another world. There was a different kind of time over there, and eventually he discovered that angels and fairies and elves and witches and Bodhisattvas and conjurs and all sorts of superhuman folk could be contacted and persuaded to become allies.

  The Sufi cell mate, a heavy cat in more ways than F.D.R. Stuart ever understood, pretended to be unimpressed with this achievement and laid down some stern raps about the perils of “Opening the Gate” without first “clarifying the soul.” The upshot of it was that young Stuart spent an hour a day memorizing a page in the dictionary until he had a vocabulary that would grace a Harvard graduate. Alas, the Sufi was paroled around then and Stuart continued his explorations unguided.

  In 1983, in Harlem, New York, Hassan i Sabbah X was the Horsethief of a group known as the Cult of the Black Mother. This was ostensibly devoted to the worship of Kali, goddess of destruction (and rebirth); the police suspected, but couldn’t prove, that it was also a kingpin in international hashish smuggling. The FBI, meanwhile, had their own suspicions; they believed it was a Black Revolutionary Army disguised as a church. An Army Intelligence agent of appropriate Negritude and duplicity managed to gain admission to one of the lower ranks but learned only that: (a) Horse thief was a term for head honcho or boss man borrowed from the gypsies; (b) the rituals were fairly close to those of orthodox Hindu Kali worship, except for certain Masonic elements; and (c) every time a black FBI agent managed to infiltrate the Cult of the Black Mother, he died very soon of a heart attack.

  The last fact was well known, and often discussed, at the Bureau. The word witchcraft popped up at least once in each of these conversations, and was quickly laughed down, but each agent went away harboring his own very private opinions. Some of them even began attending the church of their choice even more often than was expected by the rather Puritan standards of the Bureau.

  The CIA which actually employed Hassan i Sabbah X as a spy on ghetto affairs, was well aware that he planned to double-cross them at the first opportunity, but that didn’t worry them. They had their own plans for him, which were expressed in their usual jolly euphemism, “termination with maximum prejudice,” a remark illustrated by a finger drawn across the throat to make the meaning clear to neophytes. But that was only for the future, when he began to show signs of shifting allegiance.

  Now (it is the night of December 23, 1983, again) while a miniature sled with eight tiny reindeer was allegedly dodging past commercial airliners, communications satellites, flying saucers, and other technocraft in the skyways, two human beings of reprehensible character drove up to the Sutton Place digs of Mary Margaret (Epicene) Wildeblood in a truck hired from U-Haul only a few hours earlier. These were Edward J. Smith and Samuel R. Hall, and they had been purged from the Black Panther Party a few months earlier because of their fondness for the null-circuit neurological program induced by injecting diacetylmorphine (C21H23NO5) directly into their veins. This compound was known as heroin to white people and caballo to Ed and Sam’s Puerto Rican neighbors. Ed and Sam called it horse and mainlined it as often as they possibly could—“riding the horse over the rainbow” was their expression for the null program, and it meant as much to them as Samadhi to a Hindu or the Eucharist to a Catholic. In fact, it allowed them to forget for a while that, to 90 percent of their fellow citizens, they were unmistakably identifiable as niggers, a species generally regarded as twice as ugly and ten times as dangerous as wild gorillas. It didn’t matter, to Sam and Ed, that the people who believed this also believed in the existence of a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft named God, in the Virgin Birth of U.S. Senators, in the accuracy of TV news, and in premarital chastity for women.

  Sam and Ed also believed in the existence of the gaseous vertebrate, the immaculate generation of senators, the pictures on the tube, and premarital chastity for at least some women (their own sisters, wives, and daughters). They also believed that they were twice as ugly and ten times as dangerous as wild gorillas, but that they had a right to be that way. They called it Black Pride.

  Once inside the Wildeblood apartment, Ed and Sam were as efficient as a pair of vacuum cleaners. To say they took everything that wasn’t nailed down is to underestimate their rapacity. If something that looked valuable was nailed down, they employed pliers and other tools. When they finally drove away the U-Haul truck was as stuffed with goodies as the miniature sled allegedly circling the skies at that moment. When Mary Margaret Wildeblood returned from her month in Vermont, she was heard to compare her condition to that of the Chinese farmer in The Good Earth after the locusts had passed.

  Ed and Sam drove directly to the Sugar Hill apartment of Hassan i Sabbah X, which is not listed on the mailboxes and can only be reached through another apartment with the name LESTER MADDOX on it. Ed, who knew this scene better than Sam, knocked.

  “White,” said a muffled voice from inside.

  “Man,” Ed replied.

  “Native,” came the voice again.

  “Born,” Ed completed the formula.

  The door opened, and they were ushered into the home of a very respectable Afro-Methodist clergyman who had never been publicly connected in any way with Hassan i Sabbah X.

  “What was that jive?” Sam demanded.

  “Password,” Ed explained briefly.

  “Borrowed from the Ku Klux Klan,” the clergyman added with some glee. “He got himself one weird sense of humor, Brother Hassan.” He ushered them into the kitchen, slid the refrigerator around easily on specially built ball rollers, and they passed through to an apartment that did not exist in anybody’s records anywhere.

  The air was heavy with the smell of Indian hemp; an enormous statue of Kali, the Black Mother, dominated the room. A group of black men sat in a circle and Sam recognized two small cigarettes circulating in opposite directions, which he called clockwise and counterclockwise, not knowing the technical magical terms deosil and widdershins.

  “You will now ascend to the sixth plane, without my guidance,” said Hassan i Sabbah X to the circle. “I am returning to the earth plane briefly. Aummmm …”

  “Aummmm …” came the blissful reply from the students.

  Hassan led Sam and Ed to another room.

  “What’s all that sixth-plane shit?” Sam whispered to Ed.

  “Astral projection,” was the brief reply.

  Hassan seated himself at his desk and smiled genially. “Been out celebrating the Lord’s birthday?” he asked pleasantly. “Expropriating the expropriators?”

  “We got a fuckin’ truckload downstairs,” Ed replied.

  “Mmmm-mm!” Hassan said. “A merry Yuletide indeed. Class merchandise from Honkyville, or were you ripping off our brothers and sisters again?”

  “Class,” Sam said emphatically.

  “And a truckload.” Hassan smiled dreamily. “Why, brothers, if I’m as generous as my reputation, you likely to end up owning more horse than the Kentucky Derby!” He pressed a button and another black man entered the room. This was Robert Pearson by birth, Robert Pearson, Ph.D., according to the anthropology department at U.C.-Berkeley, El Hajj Stackerlee Mohammed during a militant period in the sixties, Clark Kent (with his Supermen) during his commercial rock music years, and now Robert Pearson again. “Accompany thes
e cats to our warehouse and e-valuate the cash value of their merchandise,” Hassan instructed.

  Another trip brought Ed and Sam, with Pearson, to a building on Canal Street bearing the legend BHAVANI IMPORTS. Here the truck was unloaded, cataloged and priced.

  “A genuine Klee or I’m a brass monkey,” Pearson said once. “Your uh client has bread as well as taste.”

  “Now, what’s this shit?” he said later, scrutinizing a saccharine rendition of two naked boys preparing to dive into a swimming hole, framed by a gingerbread copper-plated oval. “Oh, well, we can sell it as camp.”

  His sharpest reaction came when he confronted the redwood plaque bearing the ithyphallic eidolon.

  “Jesus H. Christ on a unicycle,” he breathed.

  Sam and Ed exchanged glances. “We can’t figure that one out, either,” Sam ventured. “Beats the hell out of our ass.”

  “Looks like some bozos joint,” Ed suggested helpfully.

  Pearson put out an exploratory hand. “Feels like some bozos joint,” he amended. “Sure as shit ain’t plastic.” He shook his head wearily. “What I want to know is what kind of bozo would do this to his joint?”

  Sam and Ed shrugged. “He was a white bozo,” Sam contributed finally.

  “I can see that,” Pearson said. “A crazy white bozo,” He rolled his eyes heavenward. “Lawd, Lawd,” he said in down-home accents, “the things that white folks do, it’s just too much for this simple cullud boy.”

  “Skin!” cried Sam.

  “Skin,” Pearson agreed. They slapped palms. And there the mystery rested until Hassan i Sabbah X arrived personally to inspect the new imports a few days later.

  “Namu Amida Butsu,” he said, peering closely. “Shee-it.”

  “Where do you think we can sell it?” Pearson asked dubiously.

  “That I do not know,” Hassan i Sabbah X pronounced slowly. “But when we do find a buyer, the price will make your head swim. This is a one-of-a-kind item.”

  Things were coming to a head. The key was no key.

  Hassan had other things on his mind that weekend; he was well aware that “Frank Sullivan” (probably, in his estimation, a double agent for both Washington and Peking) had recognized “Washy” Bridge and that opened a very wiggly can of worms, indeed. Ever since Washy had told him about Project Pan, in fact, Hassan had felt increasingly like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in the legend. A line from an H. P. Lovecraft story came back to his consciousness over and over again: “Do not, I beseech you, call up any that you cannot put down.” Like many another occultist before him, Hassan i Sabbah X now wished he had taken that warning a bit more seriously a bit sooner….

  Even before he left Bhavani Imports he was startled by an incident that seemed a definite Santaria synchromesh. “Hey, listen, man,” an art appraiser cried, catching his sleeve, “I’ve just heard the greatest limerick. Listen, just listen: ‘A habit obscene and unsavory—’” He broke down, laughing, caught himself, and repeated urgently, “Listen.” He tried again:

  “A habit obscene and unsavory

  Holds the Bishop of Boston in slavery.

  ’Midst hootings and howls—”

  He broke down again, then went on:

  “’Midst hootings and howls

  He deflowers young owls,

  Which he keeps in an underground aviary!”

  Hassan looked at him with paranoid suspicion. “Very funny,” he said, unsmiling, and hastened out to his limousine.

  “Back uptown?” the chauffeur asked.

  “Broad Street,” Hassan said, giving an address. He was in mild first-circuit anxiety all the way to his destination.

  He remembered his first conversation with Washy Bridge. “How many?” he had asked, not in shock or in outrage but in simple unbelief, inability to believe. They are our creation: we are their creation.

  “Fifty-seven of us.” The scientist was perspiring with anxiety, now that the secret was finally out, the reason he had fled Project Pan.

  “Fifty-seven,” Hassan said hollowly. Heinz 57 Varieties, he remembered absently from the advertisements. “And all of them with Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s and more diplomas than a dog has fleas …”

  “You’ve got to realize it works,” Washy said then. “You just can’t understand if you don’t keep that in mind. It works.”

  “And two hundred to three hundred years in jail for each of you if it ever gets out,” Hassan added harshly. “You just better keep that in mind too.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” the scientist said.

  Hassan had paced the room briefly. “Wheels within wheels,” he said once. “Wheels within wheels within wheels.” Once he grinned. “At least I know why the Cincinnati cocaine market is thriving,” he said with a lewd chuckle. “Cincinnati,” he repeated, shaking his head. “What do they call it again?”

  “Knights of Christianity United in Faith.”

  A habit obscene and unsavory, Hassan remembered suddenly, jostled back into present time. He had arrived at his destination.

  The man to whom he spoke then was a stockbroker according to public knowledge but pursued certain other careers in a private and clandestine manner.

  “‘Frank Sullivan,’” Hassan said. “I want to know everything about him. Everything.”

  The part-time stockbroker turned ashy-white. He got up, glared suspiciously at a window washer outside his office, and walked over to check that the window was closed all the way.

  “Impossible,” he said then, in a near whisper. “If I told you the one most amusing and interesting fact about him, I’d be dead tomorrow.”

  “That hot?” Hassan asked.

  The man leaned back in his chair and gazed absently toward the ceiling. He recited some names, beginning with Jack Ruby of Dallas and ending with a senator whose private plane had crashed just the week before, on Christmas Eve. “Those are just a few,” he ended, “who happened to find out too much about Frank Sullivan.”

  Hassan spoke only once during the drive back to Harlem.

  “Secrecy!” he said with a profound grimace.

  The chauffeur looked back nervously. He had never heard so much obscene emphasis in a single word.

  GWB-666

  He knows when you are sleeping

  He knows when you’re awake

  Within three days the storm had become a blizzard in most of the Northeast and Roy Ubu was feeling snowed under in every sense of the phrase, driving with extreme caution, thinking that the new Head of Programming for the Beast, whatzisname, Moon, really seemed to take some kind of fiendish pleasure in producing reams and reams of records to prove that the records were all defective….

  The snow whipped Ubu again as he parked and skittered into GWB to find Moon once again cheerfully perusing printouts that demonstrated, for the thirty-third time, that every single one of the missing scientists had simply stopped leaving ink or magnetic tape traces sometime between summer ‘81 and spring ’82. Which was impossible in the age of bureaucracy: It was like an animal not leaving footprints on a wet beach.

  “But the Beast is supposed to know,” Ubu had protested once.

  “GWB-666 knows everything that has been recorded,” Moon said patiently. “It does not know what has never been recorded. You can’t see behind your head; GWB-666 can’t scan what was never recorded anywhere.”

  “But dammit nobody can do anything in this country dammit without making a record.”

  “Nobody but these 132 very elusive men and women,” Moon replied placidly. “If you’ll notice, I marked the bios where it deals with experience in programming. Seventy-eight out of the 132 have such experience. They obviously learned a great deal about Erase and Cancel codes….”

  Roy Ubu made a despairing gesture. “How many bits can this thing access?” he asked wearily.

  “Over one hundred twenty billion bytes,” Simon said. “Nearly a trillion bits. There’s never been an information system like this in all history,” he added with some pride.

&
nbsp; “But it has amnesia where these scientists are concerned,” Ubu said bitterly.

  The robot whose passport said “Frank Sullivan” was in Washington that weekend and reported to a high official in Naval Intelligence, who suspected him of being a double agent infiltrating them for Air Force Intelligence.

  After the usual sordid business was disposed of, “Sullivan” asked casually if N.I. had any interest in Hassan i Sabbah X.

  “Good Lord and Aunt Agnes, no!” said the official emphatically. “Congress will have our ass if we get into anything domestic.” Then he asked, elaborately disinterested, “What did you happen to pick up?”

  “Well, if there’s no real interest …” Pseudo-Sullivan gazed off into space absently.

  There was a short silence.

  “If it’s something big …” the official said finally.

  “Sullivan” held out his hand. Another commercial transaction took place.

  “It’s about a government scientist named George Washington Bridge …” pseudo-Sullivan began….

  “Miska-what?” Roy Ubu demanded.

  “Miskatonic,” Special Agent Tobias Knight repeated. “Here’s their catalog.” He held up a booklet blazoned with a Gothic sketch of book, candle, inverse pentagram, and the motto:

  MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY

  founded 1692

  EX IGNORANTIA AD SAPIENTAM

  EX LUCE AD TENEBRAS