Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  —BERTRAND RUSSELL, Our Knowledge of the External World

  DECEMBER 23, 1983:

  Natalie Drest was amazed as the conversation swung in a new quantum direction. “You,” she gasped, “you dig Krazy Cat too?”

  “Indeed, my dear,” Blake Williams beamed. “I may be the most devout student of Herriman’s work anywhere in the civilized world.”

  He didn’t tell her (yet) that he regarded Krazy as a symbol of Schrödinger’s Cat in the great wave-mechanics puzzle.

  Even Blake Williams occasionally worried that he was talking over his audience’s head.

  But Joe Malik seeks purchase for an elbow on the back of the couch, noticing the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the corner alcove, her foot pressed down on the head of the Serpent. He was wondering what the hell Santaria was, amazed as always by the blind skill of female fingers, Carol guiding him into her without looking down actually lying with her eyes closed as she reveled no doubt in strictly private fantasy (Am I Paul Newman? Woody Allen? That damned third ex-husband? First or second ex-husband? Some damned high school football hero ten years ago?), slipping in smoothly, interlocking, beginning to merge; to meld; to float on the great ocean of sensation, to find the window.

  No wife no whores no mustache (Carol Christmas was thinking) a real weirdo he is but Arab that’s nice a Sultan we’re in the harem it’s my first time again, no a movie, yes a movie the camera moving in technicians all over the place watching me watching eyes watching me fuck the first really high art porn movie deeper ah good deeper first porn flick to win the Academy Award no more Off-Off-Broadway for me watching me watching me fuck millions of men watching me in theaters like that Pussycat we passed jerking their cocks fantasizing me fantasizing and coming don’t think of Ronnie don’t think don’t think Mongoloid the doctor said and I said I never balled a Chinaman didn’t understand at first why me why of all the millions of births on the planet that day why me don’t think about it don’t get sad again just go with it the camera the eye of the camera moving in on my face to get my orgasm and millions of men watching in theaters spurt after spurt damned cruel unjust murderous universe my poor Ronnie coming spurt spurt spurt Academy Award coming now me coming no wife? no whores? no mustache?

  And, “I love you,” Joe Malik gasped, really believing it in that warm moment slowly coming back from the reverberation of her orgasm and beginning to gallop toward his own climax as she muttered “darling oh darling” Paul Newman? Ex-Husbands? Me? Me? ME??? Me?

  But Natalie Drest, fifty blocks north, was still objecting:

  “And I thought you were just some high-brow …”

  “I am, my dear, a high-brow. And a low-brow. And I suppose, alas, even a middle-brow. A single ego, as our friend Malik was pointing out at the party tonight, is a ridiculously limiting perspective on the universe.” Williams smiled.

  “You mean like you’ve got three minds and one is a Krazy Kat fan and another is trying to study modern physics from an anthropological point of view? What does the third mind do?”

  “Ah, my dear, that is the Great Work, opening the third I …”

  What they forgot to kill, said Joe,

  Went on to organize

  “What I like is the way Offisa Pup gets embarrassed about being a dog, you know? That’s symbolism.”

  Went on to organize

  “Offisa Pup, my dear, is the superego …”

  Went on to organize

  PETER PAN! CHILDHOOD! INNOCENCE!

  In a fine old mansion on Lake Shore Drive, Markoff Chaney toddled down the hall leading to the Master Bedroom. He was dressed in a Teddy Snow Crop suit and felt like a perfect damned fool.

  Oh, well, the money is good, he told himself. Then he pushed the door open and entered the first rich person’s bedroom he had ever seen.

  There was, as he had been told, only one light, behind the bed, playing upward on the ceiling and shedding a soft glow by reflection. The bed was made up, covered with an expensive-looking heirloom spread. Beside it, lit up nicely by the indirect light, was the table bearing a single can of Snow Crop orange juice, as he had expected.

  And on the bed, nude, eyes tightly closed and pretending to sleep, was his hostess.

  Chaney caught his breath. Judging from what he was expected to do, he had been prepared to see a crazy old frump; instead, to his intense delight, it was obvious that the lady was still fairly young, quite well preserved, and definitely stacked. Crazy she might be (but how could he judge? Maybe it was normal for rich people to act out any fantasy that struck them.), but unappetizing she definitely was not.

  Although she was the first live naked woman he had ever seen, she was no less strikingly golden and rounded than, say, a Pussycat Pussyette of the Month. A head of gloriously fiery red hair was spread on the pillow, and below it her supposedly sleeping face was lovely in its peaceful anticipation. His eyes swept over her rounded shoulders, the two snowy-white breasts rising and falling with her respiration, the cute nipples that stood in surprisingly large areolas upon those breasts, the soft pillow of her belly, and, best of all, the thick swatch of reddish fur that hid her sex. And she had legs like a chorus girl.

  She’s waiting for me—for me!

  Markoff Chaney experienced true happiness. Boldly, he stepped forward and grabbed the orange-juice can. An opener lay beside it and he quickly punched two holes, his hands trembling a bit—when the lady’s belly moved with her breathing, he felt his penis stir in the same rhythm.

  Then, clutching the juice can in one hand, he hoisted himself onto the bed, catching her in a sudden smile. But she was good at the game; her eyes still didn’t open.

  Carefully, he lay beside her hip, looking at those breasts, those real 3-D female breasts, not in a photograph, but right there in bed with him. Two of them, by Christ. Then, with infinite delicacy, he lifted the can and let some of the orange juice dribble onto her bush.

  She sighed and a tremor ran through her.

  He poured a little more, and her legs spread voluptuously and she slowly raised her knees. He was seeing it at last, the outer lips and the cleft revealed as he had always dreamed of it, the halo of reddish fur even more lovely than in his fantasies. He dribbled some more orange juice and leaned over, pushing the snout onto her bush and maneuvering his tongue into the cleft between the lips.

  Immediately, she groaned and threw her legs over his shoulders, pulling him deeper down into her crotch. “Teddy,” she murmured, “you’ve come back.”

  We all live in our fantasy and only endure our reality, he thought philosophically. According to instructions, he began a spiral licking motion, working from the outer lips slowly inward around the inner lips and ending with the clitoris again. She began to heave up and down like the loud-roaring sea, and his excitement grew, as he imagined and participated in her sensations.

  Her hands were on the ears of his Teddy Snow Crop costume and she was pulling him down onto her frantically as she bucked upward, literally fucking his mouth. He began lapping her more rapidly, quite distinctly tasting the musty musky female-in-passion flavor mixed with orange juice.

  “Oh, your tongue, your tongue!” she cried. “In me, Teddy, in me.”

  The midget maneuvered his tongue into her vagina and bobbed his head in imitation fucking motions. Her legs went limp on his back, then tight, then limp again. She’s close to coming, he thought rapturously. I’m making a woman come at last. He strained, sticking his tongue farther into her, maddened by the thicker and heavier taste of her and losing the orange juice can entirely in his passion. He got both hands under her and lifted her ass, drawing her pussy up to him, sucking desperately as he plunged his tongue again and again deeper and deeper into her.

  “TEDDY SNOW CROP!” she screamed insanely. “FRO-DO BAGGINS!! PETER PAN!!! CHILDHOOD!!!! INNOCENCE!!!! EAT MY PUSSY!!!!” She was coming, gushing like an oil well, all the female juices of her flowing into his mouth, and he nibbled the outer lips with his teeth, eyes tightly closed, rid
ing on her crotch like a man hanging on to the edge of a cliff by his jaw muscles alone, bucking and bouncing with her, swallowing the essence of her womanhood, the elixir, and now after decades and decades of frustration, finally coming, exploding from the sheer lust of her soul communicated to him in every spasm and twitch of her passionate pussy.

  He thought two things: Now they’re going to have to clean the Teddy Snow Crop suit.

  And: I wonder if I’m still technically a virgin.

  THE RICH ECONOMY

  GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

  President Hubbard’s first step in establishing the RICH Economy was to offer a prize of $50,000 per year to any worker who could design a machine that would replace him or her.

  When the primate labor unions raised twenty-three varieties of hell about this plan, Hubbard countered by offering $30,000 a year to all other workers replaced by such a machine. The rank-and-file union people fell into conflict immediately, some accepting this as a fine idea (this group consisting mostly of those earning less than twenty thou per annum), and the leaders still hypnotized by the conditioned and domesticated primate reflex that Employment was Good and Unemployment was Bad.

  While the unions squabbled among themselves and ceased to present a united front against the RICH scenario, conservatives mounted a campaign against it on the ground that it was inflationary. Here Hubbard’s political genius showed itself. She made no effort to reason with the intellectual conservatives, who were all theologians in disguise. All corporation heads and other alpha males of the right, however, were invited to a series of White House multimedia presentations on how RICH would work for them.

  The chief points in these presentations were that: (1) a machine works twenty-four hours a day, not eight—thereby tripling output immediately; (2) machines do not take sick leave; (3) machines are never late for work; (4) machines do not form unions and constantly ask for higher wages and more fringe benefits; (5) machines do not take vacations; (6) machines do not harbor grudges and foul up production in sneaky, undetectable ways; (7) cybernation was advancing every decade, anyway, despite the opposition of unions, government, and these alpha males; it was better to have huge populations celebrating the reward of $30,000 to $50,000 per year for group cleverness than huge populations suffering the humility of welfare; (8) with production rising due to both cybernation and the space-cities, consumers were needed and a society on welfare was a society of very meager consumers.

  The alpha males were still fighting among themselves about whether this was “sound” or not when it squeaked through Congress.

  Within a year the first case of the new multi-inventive leisure class appeared. This was a Cherokee Indian named Starhawk, who had been an engine-lathe worker in Tucson. After designing himself out of that job, Starhawk had gone on to learn four other mechanical factory jobs, designed himself out of each, and now had a guaranteed income of $250,000 a year for these feats. He was now devoting himself to painting in the traditional Cherokee style—which was what he had always wanted to do, back in adolescence, before he learned that he had to work for a living.

  By 1983 there were over a thousand similar cases. Many had gone on to seek advanced scientific degrees, and some had already migrated to the L5 space-cities. The swarming was beginning.

  The majority of the unemployed, living comfortably on $30,000 a year, admittedly spent most of their time drinking booze, smoking weed, engaging in primate sexual acrobatics, and watching wall TV.

  When moralists complained that this was a subhuman existence, Hubbard answered, “And what kind of existence did they have doing idiot jobs that machines do better?”

  Some of the unemployed were beginning to seek jobs again; after all, $48,000 or $53,000 is better than $30,000. Usually, they found that higher education was required for the jobs that were still available. Many were back in college; adult education, already a fast-growth industry in the 1970s, was now the fastest growing field of all.

  Hubbard was ready to launch Stage Two of the RICH Economy.

  SATIRE

  The dialogues between Frank Hemeroid and Ernest Hemingway grew more turgidly moralistic as the 1970s passed; Marvin was never able to bring himself to approach a sexual partner more alien to his own tormented ego than his right fist. He sublimated.

  ERNEST: Fear is in all of us and must be faced. He who hesitates is lost. He who confronts the fear is undefeated forever, even if his body dies.

  FRANK: Oh, come off it. The only reason anybody ever does anything “brave” is because he’s more afraid of being called a no-good shit for running away.

  ERNEST: You pass a thousand heroes on the street every day and never know how well they are carrying their burdens.

  FRANK: I know. The woman with the Mongoloid child. The blind man who makes you so uncomfortable. The rape victim pulling herself together and refusing to go mad. The dumb cop with a hernia yet who goes down an alley after a hopped-up thief who is also armed. I’m not blind, myself. You only see their moments of heroism. You don’t choose to watch how blow follows blow until heroism becomes meaningless and they all give up, one by one, and join the universal chorus of despair.

  ERNEST: I have seen some who never gave up. A pig squeals when he sees the ax coming. A man can look right at the ax all his life and not squeal.

  FRANK: The ax falls, anyway, does it not? Isn’t your refusal to squeal just a big act, a gigantic lie? It’s more honest to squeal with the other swine.

  ERNEST: I still decline to admit that men are no more than swine.

  FRANK: You are a Romantic, you old fool. If you had been honest enough to squeal like the rest of the swine, people would have seen the truth sooner. Every war since your day has been partly your fault, you know. If everybody squealed and ran away, there’d be no wars.

  Of course nobody wanted to publish this kind of ranting—although it took Marvin nearly ten years to learn that.

  In 1979 he set out grimly to write the worst, most tasteless, most vulgar book possible. He had arrived at that stage of psychological masochism where one must prove one’s most pessimistic assumptions are true, for the sheer delight of knowing once and for all that the universe is really a pisspoor proposition all around. “Public taste is a misanthropist’s heaven and a humanitarian’s hell,” he said bitterly. For his hero he elected a monster so monstrous as to be a mockery of all human hope, but one so obscure that he did not possess any of the evil glamour that surrounds a Hitler, a Nixon, or a Jack the Ripper. He picked Vlad Teppis—Vlad the Impaler—a fourteenth-century Hungarian religious fanatic who had executed 100,000 people for differing with his own extremely odd theological notions.

  Marvin’s novel not only justified Vlad, but positively glorifed him; it was full of denunciations of liberalism, permissiveness, and the opponents of capital punishment. It also had the most violent rape scenes Marvin could conjure out of his misogynistic imagination.

  Vlad the Barbarian was a blatant incitement to violence, garbed in the most reactionary moralistic prejudices imaginable. It was bought by the first New York publisher to whom it was submitted, for a higher advance than Albert Speer’s memoirs or any of the confessionals of the Watergate felons. A movie sale was negotiated even before the book was released, and John Wayne starred as Vlad, looking really sincere every time he explained why murder and rape were the highest human virtues.

  Marvin was immediately commissioned to write a sequel, Vlad Victorious.

  Actually, because Marvin really was, in his own odd way, a philosopher of sorts, Vlad the Barbarian was not totally bad. In researching it Marvin had stumbled upon the enigma that makes Vlad Teppis somewhat interesting to students of the human mind in general and the ruling-class mind in particular. The mystery was this: Two early, approximately contemporary and seemingly authentic accounts tell one particular story about Vlad, but each tells it differently. There is thus no scientific way of saying which account is true.

  The disputed story is that two monks on a journey stopped
at Vlad’s castle one night and begged shelter from the elements. Vlad set out for them a magnificent banquet and then afterward asked them what the people of Hungary really thought about him. The first monk answered diplomatically and falsely that everybody said Vlad was a stern but just ruler. The second monk boldly told the truth: that everybody said Vlad was a homicidal maniac. Vlad thereupon had one of the monks impaled. The problem is that the first seemingly authentic account says he executed the flattering liar, and the other seemingly authentic account claims he executed the honest monk.

  Marvin left this mystery unsolved in his book, and it was, perhaps, one reason that the novel became fashionable even with intellectuals.

  Everybody, it appeared, had some intuitive, prelogical feeling about which monk a man of the caliber of Vlad Teppis would impale. Some were quite sure that a dingaling of that sort would kill the one who dared to tell him the truth. Others, however, were just as sure that Vlad would find a special sadistic relish, and a moral justification to boot, in surprising both monks by executing the flatterer.

  Arguing about Vlad’s choice, as it was soon called, spread from coast to coast.

  “What would you do if you were one of the monks?” was a favorite question in these arguments.

  “I’d do what the first monk did,” Simon Moon said, in an argument with other programmers who worked with the Beast. “I’d tell Vlad he was the very model of a Christian statesman—which, in fact, he was.”

  “I’d tell the truth,” said Markoff Chaney, on a Greyhound bus, “just to prove that little men have big balls.”

  “I’d lie,” Dr. Frank Dashwood admitted at a posh Nob Hill party in San Francisco. “The most dangerous thing in the world is to tell the truth to a government official who is a primitive barbarian, in fourteenth-century Transylvania or twentieth-century America.”