Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  “No, it’s more complicated than that,” Mary Margaret argued. “The motive for the attempted suicide is never explained. Just like the motive for the real suicide in the Samara novel is never explained.”

  “Does it need to be explained?” Williams drawled, waving at the waiter for another martini. “If I were trapped into selling cars for a living, I’d think about blowing my head off occasionally.”

  “Yes, but,” Mary Margaret said. “Most people never see the emptiness of their lives the way these two characters of O’Hara’s do. That’s the Turn of the Screw. It’s like the parable Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. How he was hired to find a real estate salesman who’d disappeared …”

  “A salesman again,” Williams noted. “We are toying with synchronicity. When does Arthur Miller come on the scene?”

  “Wait,” Mary Margaret said. “It gets weirder. This salesman, in Spade’s story, just went out to lunch one day and never returned. No evidence of foul play, no suicide note, nada. Years pass, and his wife wants to marry again, so she hires Spade to prove the salesman is really dead. Spade digs around and finds the salesman alive in another town, with a new name and a new family. He explains to Spade what happened when he went out to lunch that day and simply disappeared. A girder fell from a building under construction—you want to talk about synchronicity?—and almost killed him. It missed him only a few feet. It was like a Satori experience.”

  “A WHAT???” Peter Jackson, the Black editor, cried in astonishment at the next table.

  Mary Margaret and Blake were both hooked; they looked deep, deep into their martini glasses as they strained not to miss pseudo-Sullivan’s answer.

  “A Rehnquist,” the humanoid said.

  “Jumpin’ Jesus on a rubber crutch,” Peter Jackson said. “You’re not putting me on? You mean right in the middle of the staircase …”

  “Where the Ambassador had to see it when he came down to the reception,” pseudo-Sullivan said. “A great big one, like Harry Reems’s, or what’s-his-name’s in the porn movies. With a pink ribbon around it. The Company,” he stressed the word slightly, avoiding the initials, “thinks the KGB did it. Believe me, the Ambassador hasn’t been the same man since.”

  “Good Lord,” Blake Williams said. “It’s like your falling-girder story. Except in this case it’s a falling Rehnquist … from the Fourth Dimension, maybe.” He was thinking that this was too wild to be a KGB project and might involve the paranormal.

  “Eva Gebloomenkraft was there,” pseudo-Sullivan went on, “and kept trying to calm the Ambassador down, but he was just making those gargling noises and turning a funny kinda purple color….”

  “Eva Gebloomenkraft,” Jackson said. “Isn’t she that rich dame with the big Brownmillers who keeps getting eighty-sixed from nightclubs all over Europe?”

  “Yeah,” pseudo-Sullivan said. “A Jet Setter, you know? But she tried awfully hard to cheer up the Ambassador. Kept making little jokes about Freud’s theories—Castration Anxiety and Rehnquist Envy and so on…. By then it had disappeared, by the way. But we know damned well the Ambassador didn’t hallucinate it. Two of our men saw it, but they got distracted, trying to calm the Ambassador down when he first started jumping up and down and howling, ‘In a pink ribbon, a pink ribbon!’ and, ‘What diseased mind could conceive it?’ And stuff like that….”

  “It was as if this man’s life was a watch,” Mary Margaret said, picking up her own narrative. “And a jeweler had taken the back off and let him see how the gears worked. Nothing had meaning anymore in a universe where there’s no good reason why a girder hits you or misses you.”

  “And Dashiell Hammett wrote this, you say?” Williams prompted. “It sounds very Existentialist.”

  Mary Margaret finished her sixth martini. “Hammett not only wrote it,” she said, “he lived it. He spent ten years working for the Pinkertons when Class War was really War in this country. He knew that the girders fall on the just and the unjust.”

  “You mean he was a real detective who wrote about fictitious detectives?” Williams was off on his own tangent at once. “That’s like Gödel’s Proof. Or Escher painting himself painting himself …”

  “Don’t get too intellectual about it,” Mary Margaret said. “You might miss the obvious.”

  SINCERITY IN SPELVINS

  I’d rather have my mail delivered by Lockheed than ride in a plane built by the post office department.

  —BARTHOLOMEW GIMBLE

  Dr. Dashwood went out to dinner that night with Dr. Bertha Van Ation, the astronomer from Griffith Observatory who had discovered the two planets beyond Pluto.

  Dashwood ordered a Manhattan with Southern Comfort—a combination that had never occurred to him before. He wondered how the idea got into his head—and Dr. Van Ation decided to try the same.

  “Goethe said, ‘Man muss entweder der Hammer oder der Amboss sein’—you must be the hammer or the anvil,” said a voice in the next booth.

  “Mmm,” Bertha Van Ation said. “This is good.” She was sampling her Manhattan with Southern Comfort.

  “Of course, he was just being melodramatic,” the voice in the next booth said. “As an artist he must have known there are states in which you are both the hammer and the anvil—there’s no either/or about it. That’s the creative fire.”

  “So what’s new in astronomy?” Dr. Dashwood asked.

  “Uh?” Bertha said. “Oh, sorry, I was eavesdropping on the next booth.”

  “The hammer and the anvil,” Dashwood said. “I heard him too. Must be a poet. They tell me we have more poets ‘of anthology rank,’ whatever that is, than any other city in America.”

  “Like the Hammerklavier sonata,” said a new voice, a feminine one, in the adjoining booth. “Beethoven was both the hammer and the anvil there. Maybe he even intended the pun. He read Goethe, didn’t he?”

  “Read him?” asked the first voice. “They knew each other. Would have been friends, if two egomaniacs could become friends.”

  “This is my favorite vice,” Bertha whispered. “Listening in on the conversation at the next table.”

  “It sure sounds as if he had that idea in mind,” the feminine voice said. “Is there any other piano piece where the pianist literally has to hammer away at the keys like that?”

  “This is weird,” Dashwood whispered. “I got a crank letter today—we get them by the ton at Orgasm Research, as you can imagine—and it was all about the Hammerklavier.”

  “My, what erudite cranks you attract,” Bertha whispered. “The cranks who write to us, at Griffith, are mostly illiterate farmers who have seen UFOs.”

  “They went walking on the street once,” the man in the next booth boomed. “And everybody kept bowing to them. Goethe finally said, ‘I find all this ostentatious honor a bit embarrassing.’ And you know what Ludwig said? He said, ‘Don’t let it bother you. It is me they are honoring.’”

  The woman’s silvery laugh had golden highlights of hashish in it. “That’s Beethoven for you,” she said.

  Suddenly the two arose; they had evidently paid their check already and had been lingering over their coffee. Dr. Dashwood and Dr. Van Ation, without being conspicuous about it, looked them over as they left. They were both Chinese.

  “That’s San Francisco for you,” Dashwood said.

  “I bought a Vivaldi record the other day,” Bertha said. “It was made by a classical group in Japan, and they played his Four Seasons music on Japanese instruments. It sounded remarkably like the harpischord he wrote it for.”

  “M,” Dashwood nodded. “And we’ve got all these kids playing sitars and trying to sound like Ravi Shankar.”

  “The arts and sciences have always been international,” Bertha said. “It’s only our damned politics that remain nationalistic. To our sorrow.”

  “Mn,” Dashwood nodded again. “But, as I was asking you a while ago, what’s new in astronomy?”

  “Well,” Bertha said intensely,
leaning forward, “the universe is turning out to be a hell of a lot bigger than we thought even three or four years ago….”

  At the other end of the room, seated at a table that gave a good view of Dashwood, the Continental Op was enjoying swordfish steak. He enjoyed it even more when he reminded himself that it could go on the expense account.

  He owed this good fortune to the fact that Dashwood did not know his face yet.

  Outside and across the street, Tobias Knight was dining on doughnuts and coffee from a deli, and bemoaning the fact that this typically warm San Francisco day had turned into a typically cold San Francisco night.

  He owed this exile in the cold to the fact that Dashwood did know his face.

  In Washington, Simon Moon had gone cruising at a bar called the Easter Basket. He had there picked up a young boy named Marlon Murphy, who had long blond hair and girlish mannerisms, both of which were qualities Simon appreciated.

  They had gone back to Simon’s pad and smoked some hash. Then they rapped for a while, and Simon learned that Marlon was working on a Master’s in social psych, had a father who was a cop in San Francisco, and was a member of Purity of Ecology.

  Simon decided not to hold the last fact against the boy.

  When they went to bed Simon was the more aggressive at first, Briggsing young Marlon with slurping passion. But they soon turned it into a game, and each one would Briggs the other for a while, always stopping when it seemed one of them might reach Millett. After an hour of this they were both on hair trigger, and could restrain themselves no longer. Simon began to Bryant Marlon and they both started howling and panting and moaning until the bedroom began to sound like the Lion House at the zoo around mating time.

  It was Simon Moon’s idea of a great evening.

  Dr. Dashwood was explaining the three dimensions of Briggsing to Dr. Van Ation, over coffee, at the other end of the continent.

  “There just can’t be any science without dimension,” Dashwood said earnestly. “Fechner was the pioneer, psychometrics, what tastes sweeter than what and that sort of stuff. Primitive, of course, but it was the beginning of the quantification of the subjective, and my work could have followed immediately from his, except,” he sighed, “you know how it is, fear and prejudice prevented the application of these methods to sex for a long time.”

  Dr Van Ation nodded somberly.

  “Sincerity we measure in Spelvins on a scale of zero to ten,” Dashwood went on, totally absorbed in his subject. “Hedonism in Lovelaces—we’ve been lucky there; subjects are able to distinguish sixteen graduations. Finally, there’s the dimension of Tenderness—we find zero to seven covers that, so that the perfect Steinem Job, if I may use the vernacular, would consist of ten Spelvins of Sincerity, sixteen Lovelaces of Hedonism, and seven Havens of Tenderness.”

  “It certainly makes our work seem easy by comparison,” Dr. Van Ation said. “Everything is so concrete and objective in astronomy.”

  “What does that mean?” Marlon Murphy asked idly.

  Simon, propping himself up on a pillow, looked where the boy was pointing. It was a sticker attached to the console of Simon’s home computer, and it was in gold and black, with a dollar sign over which were imprinted the letters:

  T.A.N.S.T.A.G.I.

  “Oh, that,” Simon said. “It’s the insignia of the Invisible Hand Society.”

  “What’s it mean—T.A.N.S.T.A.G.I.?”

  “There Ain’t No Such Thing as Government Interference,” Simon translated.

  Marlon rolled over and stared at him. “What is it, some kind of paradox?”

  Simon smiled in that infuriatingly serene way that the enlightened always smile when dealing with the unenlightened. “It’s no paradox,” he said. “It’s a simple statement of fact.”

  Marlon moved a few inches away. “You’re some kind of mystic?” he asked nervously. The only mystics he had met were on the West Coast, and they were all, in his opinion, bonkers.

  “Yes,” Simon said easily. “We in the Invisible Hand are mystics; but we are also scientists. Every one of us has an advanced degree in math or quantum physics or computer science or some such field. Our founder, Dr. Rauss Elysium, was an expert in gravitational geometro-dynamics—four-dimensional topology, and so on—before he got into General Systems Theory.”

  “And you people, with all that math and so on, have convinced yourselves that the government doesn’t really exist?” Marlon was beginning to get an exciting idea: he would do his Master’s on this Invisible Hand Society, as an illustration of the psychological law that the more brilliant a mind is, the more elaborate will be its delusory system if it snaps.

  “That’s it,” Simon said calmly. “A chicken is the egg’s way of making more eggs. Government is anarchy’s way of making more anarchy. Let me explain….”

  “So they were all poisoned by Hollandaise Sauce,” Mary Margaret prompted, finishing her seventh martini delicately.

  Blake Williams was deciding that Mary Margaret was a damned good-looking woman, considering that she had been a man until six months ago. He was on his seventh martini, too, and Marjorie Main would have looked like a damned attractive woman to him by then, even made up to look like Humphrey Bogart’s mother in Dead End.

  “Yes,” he said, “well, that’s not the mystery. They were all rushed to a hospital, and had their stomachs pumped, and they survived. I don’t remember what had contaminated the Hollandaise Sauce, but it doesn’t really matter. That’s not the mystery.”

  “Well, what is the mystery?” Mary Margaret prompted. She was Encouraging him to Talk, and that suddenly alarmed him. It meant only one thing: she was thinking of going to bed with him.

  “Uh,” he said, “the mystery was what happened later.” He had been thinking she was attractive, yes, but that was fairly abstract; he hadn’t really decided, and when you faced up to it, she was still partly male in his mind.

  “What happened later?” she prompted.

  Dammit! he thought. I must have had one martini too many. She was a woman now; no doubt about it. So what was the problem?

  “They all came down with the same symptoms again,” he said. “The next time they had food with Hollandaise Sauce.” The problem was that they would not merely Potter Stewart; there would be a certain amount of fore-play naturally, and they would be Briggsing each other.

  “Oh? It was a synchronicity—two cases of contaminated Hollandaise Sauce hitting the same people?” Mary Margaret prompted him again.

  “Ah no, it was far weirder than that.” What was the matter? He had Briggsed a lot of women in his time, and had been Briggsed by a lot of them—he always enjoyed a good Steinem Job, God knows—but still … there was something a bit faggoty about it when the woman was an ex-man and still partly aman in your memory. “Ah,” he repeated, damning those martinis, “you see, there was nothing wrong with the Hollandaise Sauce the second time. No contaminant at all. They weren’t poisoned. They ah just had the symptoms of poisoning.”

  “That is weird,” Mary Margaret said, wondering if he was getting so flustered because he had never been to bed with a transsexual before. Well, he was an anthropologist, wasn’t he? He should regard it as an educational experience.

  “Very weird,” Blake Williams said, “because you can’t explain it by conditioning theory. Conditioning is a slow process, remember, requiring many repetitions or ah reinforcements. That’s how Pavlov’s dog learned that bell means food—repetition after repetition. But the dog level or reflex level of these people had learned that Hollan-daise Sauce means poison in only one exposure.” He should regard it as an educational experience, he decided; after all, he was an anthropologist.

  “Well, I never believed you could explain everything by conditioning theory,” Mary Margaret said. “I’m a Humanist.”

  “That’s all very well and good, I’m sure,” Blake Williams said, “but ah scientifically the behavior in question was certainly not mediated through the rational circuits of the cortex and
does require ah some sort of explanation. I mean, if it wasn’t conditioning, what the Potter Stewart was it?”

  “Mmm,” said Mary Margaret. “Mmm? How about imprinting?”

  “What?” Dr. Williams looked, for a moment, like the Ambassador finding the Rehnquist on the stairs.

  “Imprinting,” Mary Margaret said. “When an animal learns something all-at-once-in-a-flash. Isn’t that called imprinting?”

  Williams stared.

  “I think you’ve got it,” he said finally. “How would you ah like to go up to my apartment and discuss this further?”

  He was suddenly madly in love with her. She had given him a New Idea.

  In San Francisco, Dr. Van Ation had been Briggsing Dr. Dashwood for twenty minutes.

  He sounded like a man at prayer. “Oh, God,” he kept repeating. “Oh, God, God, God …”

  Dr. Van Ation was thoroughly enjoying herself. Dashwood had Briggsed her for forty minutes, during which she reached Millet six times, and she was still purring with gratitude.

  “Oh, God, God, God,” Dashwood croaked, as her tongue continued to excite his Rehnquist.

  “And so,” Simon Moon concluded, “government is just a glitch. A semantic hallucination.”

  “Mrn—mn,” said Marlon Murphy.

  Simon turned around and looked at the boy; and it was as he feared; Marlon was about 80 percent asleep. Simon had been lecturing virtually to himself for several minutes.

  “Non Illegitimati carborundum,” he muttered. It was his mantra against resentment, wrath, and other diseases of the ego.

  He leaned over and kissed Marlon lightly on the ear.

  “Mrn,” Marlon mumbled.

  Simon got up from the bed and padded into the living room, where he smoked a little more hash and remembered classrooms back in Chicago, beatings he had received for being intellectual and queer, the first boy he had ever Briggsed (wasn’t his name Donald something?), the beauty of Russell’s definition of number when he finally grasped it (the class of all classes that are similar), the first time he was Bryanted (he was afraid it would hurt), the strange out-of-book experience in New York on hash when he saw that the laws that govern us are partly grammatical and partly pure whimsy, and this was very good hash, indeed, because he could almost remember that experience: there was a universe where he was hetero and Furbish Lousewart was President; yes, this was very high-grade hash, indeed, and he almost believed it, and why not? The math certainly did imply such universes, and each universe could be like a book, each book a variation on the same theme, and the Author (if one dared to try imagine such a Being) might even be in a meta-universe which had its own Author, and so on, to infinity….