Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  Mysticism and monomania appear. Many of the mutated biots become convinced that they control everything (the “I-am-God” syndrome), not realizing that they merely control their own perceptual field.

  “Miracle healings” are reported. The neurosomatic (“mind body”) feedback loop allows the mutant biots to become healthier, younger-looking, and sleeker (“handsomer”) than average. They soon believe, and are encouraged by their admirers to never doubt, that they can “cure” anything.

  Neurosomatic intolerance appears. The mutated biots grow annoyed, and become extremely critical about, the robot mechanisms of first-circuit approach-avoidance, second-circuit domination-submission, third-circuit either or-logic, and static fourth-circuit sex roles. They call on everybody to float free like themselves, or like the wind.

  The other biots usually declare these five-circuit mutants to be divine, or else they kill them. Sometimes they do both.

  The condition was just becoming understood on Terra at the time of this Quantum Comedy, as neuropharmacologists slowly traced the links between neurochemistry and the creation of perceived reality-tunnels.

  GRAPEFRUIT THROUGH THE NIGHT

  Anyone with I’s in their hood could see it was a tight cityation there on bonger howl, one nation under guard, as Case tosses in the midst of the nightmare, all of them whooping it oop with their tommyhawk fans and their moody decks and their scolded litters, one nation in a dirigible.

  Forty of them with town feathers, raising coin as much as they were able, insidious rapacious seditious, with their stars bangled bangers and the ramrods we welshed, through the nox with the lox from a bulb, till the girl with colitis goes by, and Case really saddling hard into it and glowing coolish along with it and hooverin deeper and dotter into doubt about it, pushing a head with their desotos and pontiacs there. “Buy all Chimatong highdeals,” they sang.

  It was the Guylum Bardot or the Bardot Theodial or if not it was the vector moaning there, all singing O atum bomb O adum bum vee green send unum blather. The very muddle of a model motel tea party: Immolaton, Resurrection, Sewandsow.

  And Justin Case awoke.

  Just a nightmare, just a nightmare … Indians auditing his income tax and all that, fading now, only a trauma house, or a drama, yes, fadern.

  Justin sat up and turned on the light.

  His first thought was that he was only dreaming that he had awakened.

  For, at the foot of his bed, there stood a little green man in a miniature NASA spacesuit.

  “I am Apollon of Mars,” he said. “Come with me at once.”

  THERE IS NO GOVERNOR ANYWHERE

  Hugh Crane served his contempt-of-Congress sentence at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, the “gentleman’s club” as the Maf calls it, where the government incarcerates those ritzy felons who are not likely to shiv a guard or climb a wall.

  He worked in the library with Alger Hiss. They both watched the famous “Checkers” speech on the TV in the rec room. This was a masterpiece of primate oratory in which a vice presidential candidate named Richard Nixon argued that huge sums of money given to him by various businessmen were not intended as bribes and were not expected to result in reciprocal favors on his part.

  “As an old carny man,” Mr. Hiss asked Mr. Crane, “what do you think of that performance?”

  “The dog shtik was very good,” Crane said professionally. “But he left out Mother.”

  Another distinguished guest at Lewisburg that year was the aging Idaho poet and folk singer Ezra Pound, who was also in for Un-American Activities. He and Crane never got along well, because Pound, who had seldom been outside Idaho, distrusted all easterners.

  Crane performed yoga exercises every day in his cell. The Illuminati, of course, subsequently scanned the notes he kept on these neurophysiological experiments. The most interesting items were the following:

  April 23, 1952—It helps if you identify each letter of AUM with one of the three gods of the Hindu trinity. A is Brahm, the Creator: let it explode upward from the diaphragm, like the big bang of creation itself. U is Vishnu, the Preserver: hold it so long that it vibrates, like the rhythm of life, the Big Beat of Beethoven’s Seventh. M is Shiva, the Destroyer: close the lips in a decisive bite of “This is the way the world ends” as you enter the silence.

  May 1, 1952—Today, unexpectedly, pure dhyana. It was so much simpler than I ever guessed, and it is obviously a matter of practice. No wonder the yogis say that it’s dangerous to do this without a guru: I am no better or worse, morally, and no wiser or more “spiritual.” Repetition is the whole key. Force the nerves and muscles and glands, force them day after day, and it happens. The chief function of the guru is to ensure that you don’t take advantage of the new freedom too quickly and get yourself in trouble with the authorities. The guru doesn’t help it happen at all (as the honest ones admit); you do all the work yourself. The guru just makes sure that the rapture flows into “safe” (domesticated?) channels. Without such a moral watchdog, I am free to do as I bloody please.

  I just realized why all the real occult schools are so damned secretive, why the ordinary seeker is given a lot of double-talk and ejected out the same door wherein he came. If everybody could do this, the whole world would be in continuous revolution.*

  May 27, 1952—Another successful dhyana. There’s nothing to it, really. The brain obviously operates on the same principle as those fellows in The Hunting of the Snark: “What I tell you three times is true.” (Three million times is more accurate.) It was marvelous—better than the first time—and I’ll never identify with “Cagliostro the Great” or “Hugh Crane” or even “me” or the perpendicular pronoun, ever again.

  I can see more and more clearly why all this is “sealed with seven seals” and hidden behind all kinds of mystification. Society as we know it is based on torture and death, or the threat of torture and death. I am in here to be tortured, although the authorities will never admit that. (What they do with heretics in other countries is torture; what we do here is penology.) The cage experience is profoundly punishing to the average human, as to any primate; it is the form of torture our society countenances. It is no torture to me only because I have learned certain neurological arts every stage magician learns.

  But if everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled—by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses.

  Ten people who know what I know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.

  July 23, 1952—I can hardly write. Today I reached Samadhi. It makes dhyana look like nothing by comparison. All my certainty is gone. I should be terrified, but instead I’m ecstatic. If this is possible, anything is possible.*

  These notes were not published when Hugh came out of prison. Instead, he brought forth a book cheerfully titled There is No Governor Anywhere, which explained some—not all—of his magic escapes, and set this in the context of a philosophy which declared every individual a creator of his own universe. The polemics against government and organized religion were tactless, to say the least, for a performer depending upon public goodwill; Crane did not hesitate to identify his outlook bluntly as atheism and anarchism.

  To everybody’s surprise, including Crane’s, the book became a best-seller, and he became the most controversial man in the United States. Even in the fearful fifties—even with American Legion and John Birch chapters constantly reminding everyone of his drug arrests, his sex arrests, and the documented fact that prison authorities had delayed his parole because of his homosexual seduction of a younger inmate—Hugh Crane acquired a new following. TV gingerly tested him on the egghead ghetto of Sunday afternoon, then promoted him to the late-late talk shows.

  He managed to end every appearance with the words “There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free.”

  And around then—to the vocal dismay of press and clergy—a club owne
r decided he was a “freak” act (“They’ll hate him but they’ll come”) and Crane was able to work as a magician again. The crowd overflowed into the street and many were turned away. Cagliostro introduced a new escape, from a lead box that had been welded closed in view of the audience. “There is no restraint that cannot be escaped,” he told them in an intense tone. “We are all absolutely free.”

  A pudgy Broadway columnist named Benny Benedict, who was just starting to get a following, interviewed him the next day. “How the hell did you manage that welded-box escape?” Benedict asked bluntly.

  “I used real magic,” the Great Cagliostro pronounced.

  “Come off it,” Benedict said. But Cagliostro merely grinned at him impudently.

  *Terran Achives 2803: Dhyana was the Sanskrit name, used by the Hindic primates, to describe the opening and imprinting of the neurosomatic circuit. The term, and the techniques of inducing it, became Ch’an in China and Zen in Japan. It was always supervised by an alpha male for the reasons Crane suspected. It represents the dawning of post-primate consciousness and the HEAD Revolution, thereby rendering the biot independent of the primate dominance-submission hierarchy.

  *Terran Archives 2803: Samadhi was the Hindustani name for the opening and imprinting of the sixth (metraprogramming) circuit in the frontal lobes of the post-primate brain. Most of those who achieved it before the HEAD Revolution were just as bewildered as Crane and could say only that the experience was “ineffable.”

  THE ORDEAL OF RHODA CHIEF

  When Rhoda Chief became the country’s top Rock singer at the age of seventeen in 1958, her education was virtually nil. She knew very few facts and several dozen factoids: the long side of the triangle is called the hypotenuse and is equal to both of the other sides, or one side multiplied by the other, or something like that; what she had in her panties could make a lot of money if she was smart, or a lot of trouble if she was dumb; if you spit on an eraser, it will erase ink; Columbus did his trip in 1492, and they either started the revolution or finished it in 1776; Lincoln freed the slaves; if you yell loud enough nobody can tell if you’re on key or off; we’re all gonna get blown to hell by the bomb sooner or later; yellows make all your troubles go away, but the reds are the ones to take before a concert or a recording session.

  After her abortion she learned enough about birth control to teach a course at the YWCA. After being screwed blued and tattooed by two record companies in a row, she also learned enough about contract law to teach that at Harvard.

  Her real education began when she became the mistress of Cagliostro the Great.

  The first one to see the whip marks on Rhoda’s back was an old friend from Arkham High School, Doris Horus.

  “Why don’t you leave him?” Doris asked.

  “It’s voluntary,” Rhoda said stonily. “It’s my True Will.”

  The scandal eventually became an official rumor—“A nightclub Nostradamus, previously involved in other sex and drug offenses, is treating his ballad-belting sweetheart in a very sick way. Readers of a certain French marquis will know what I mean,” was its first printed form, in the nation’s most widely read gossip column. “You’ve got quite a reputation as a sadist,” Epicene Wildeblood, the literary critic, said to Crane the very day that appeared.

  “Afraid to be identified with me publicly?” Crane asked. They were in Wildeblood’s jet-set pad, on Sutton Place.

  “Oh, not at all, darling,” Eppy purred. “How funny that I should know what you really are. Don’t I, babe?” He lifted Crane’s chin with the toe of his shoe.

  “Yes, master,” Crane mumbled.

  “Oh, that sounded a little sullen. I think you’re just a bit rebellious today, babe. That must be punished.”

  “Yes, master,” Crane said, going to the closet for the ropes. After he was stripped, and lying face down on the bed, Eppy carefully tied his four limbs to the four bedposts.

  “You are my slave and you can’t escape,” he said.

  “I am your slave and I can’t escape,” Crane repeated, as Wildeblood mounted him, both of them perfectly aware that he could slip the knots at any time.

  Crane took Rhoda to the Rainbow Room that night and made a point of loudly and brutally humiliating her throughout the meal. She accepted it all (her hundred most intimate friends and enemies in the room noticed with disapproval), as if he had hypnotized her.

  Rhoda actually took nearly a year to discover what was happening to her. It had started with a routine roll in the hay, but in the middle of it he lifted her to an unusual position. “What the hell is this?” she asked.

  “Tibetan, angel,” he said softly. “Relax and you’ll enjoy it.”

  She relaxed, and it was the most extraordinary sexual experience of her life. After that, for two months, she followed all of his instructions, with growing delight and a firm belief that she was approaching that Ultimate Orgasm the Mailer fellow was always writing about. Then, one night, he brought out the ropes.

  “Now, wait a minute,” she said, “that’s English. That’s kink. Go to London if you want that.”

  “I love you,” he murmured, his mouth moving south across her belly toward her bush; in a little while, she agreed to the restraints. He tied them very firmly—and then, to her relief, no weapon was produced. He didn’t even produce his own weapon; it was entirely oral. After five orgasms, she found him sitting up and lighting a joint. In a minute, he held it to her own lips. “For the big one,” he said. She toked hungrily while he kissed and caressed her and muttered endearments—but she could still feel the ropes. When the joint was finished he finally mounted her and galloped into some dimension of spasm she had never known before.

  “God,” she said, coming back to herself, “that was the big one.” But he was reversed again, his mouth on her snatch, and her head spun.

  The mild discipline began a few weeks later. “It builds up the charge,” he said, and she found that it did. Soon she agreed that stronger discipline built an ever-greater charge. When the sadism switched to a psychological level, she was too far gone to stop, living in a dark and pulsating cave of ecstasy and pain millions of light-years from common earth. She accepted degradation, humiliation, and the growing vampirism which seemed calculated to slowly destroy her last remnants of ego.

  Once or twice, she remembered later, she had feebly protested, “Enough, too much. Please.”

  “No!” he shouted. “We’re at the edge. We’ve got to go all the way over.”

  (“Yes, master,” he would be saying to Epicene Wildeblood a few hours later, “whatever you wish, master.”)

  “You could have lots of bookings, instead of just working in public terlets,” his agent told him. “I could get you in top-money rooms. People would forget those drug charges, and those teenaged girls, if you didn’t keep reminding them by being even worse. The way you and Rhoda carry on in public, everyone thinks you’re a kink. And you and that faggot, Wildeblood—everyone thinks you’re a touch lavender yourself, buddy. Why don’t you straighten out, for Christ’s sake? You’re going to end up a beggar.”

  (Remembering: possibly a previous incarnation: Hesse at the station in Zurich: “The mescaline, ja, the mescaline is the great teacher”: and Crowley in Berlin: “The question is, who is it that seeks the True Self?” All so long ago, so far away, and Richard Jung saying, “I am an accountant, I don’t buy any of this mysticism,” begging on the street near the Old Granary where Paul Revere and the original Five lie buried, Rancid the Butler, Mama Sutra, weeping among the corpses at Chateau Thierry. “Please Jesus don’t let me die, don’t let me die …”)

  The boy, who was to become Cagliostro the Great, heard “You’re going to end up a beggar” and looked back and saw the tramp falling to the ground, very slowly, like the tree he had seen fall slowly after being chopped by the caretaker at the upstate Crane country home. And, just like the tree, when he finally reached the sidewalk, the tramp didn’t move at all, not one bit; he even seemed to get stiff like t
he tree did, only faster.

  “On your knees,” Cagliostro said sternly, and Rhoda obediently crossed the floor on her knees.

  “Ask for it,” he said.

  “I beg you, master,” she said, “to stick your cock inside my cunt and fuck me and make me come again and again and again. Oh, please, master.”

  He lit a cigar, pretending to deliberate, and then blew smoke in her face. “No,” he said. “I want you to suck me off. Nothing at all for you tonight.”

  But a few nights later, when he was on top of her and inside her, and chanting in Tibetan, she suddenly thought she saw a kind of light around his head and two horns sprouting on his temple, and then it was like a million balloons bursting inside her and outside her at once, each balloon releasing a twinkle of light, each light a species of orgasm. “Rhoda Chief” ceased to exist. Eternities later, reentering time, she found he was again at the bottom of the bed, head between her legs, licking ferociously. She fainted.

  He had a large library dealing with both stage magic and occultism, and Rhoda occasionally browsed in it. The next morning, while he was still asleep, she went back to it and searched in several volumes by Rosenkreuz, Therion, Iambacchus, Prinn, Dee, and Kelly. “The Mass of the Holy Ghost” was variously described, but the Rose of Ruby was always identified with water and the first H in JHVH, the H of motherhood. The Cross of Gold had different meanings, too, but was chiefly fire and the J of JHVH, the J of fatherhood. Bringing the J and the H together, the wedding of Cross and Rose, produced the manifestation of the Holy Ghost in the form of a eucharist, which was then consumed by the alchemist. My God, she thought, the Cross is his cock and the Rose is my cunt; that’s why he goes down on me afterward, as well as just beforae. “The eucharist,” old Prinn’s words said blandly, “is both male and female, both living and dead, both fire and water, and yet its creation involves no violation of nature but merely obedience to nature’s own laws, together with the proper spiritual attitude.”