Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  They found the slingshot, abandoned, on the floor of the first pew, to the right. That was the direction the Rehnquist had come from, and they all breathed a sigh of relief.

  The Archbishop told them, then, the rumors he had heard about the incident of the Unistat Ambassador who had to be put on morphine after finding It, wrapped in pink ribbon, on a staircase.

  “We are dealing with a deranged mind,” His Eminence said, “but not with anything ‘supernatural,’ thank God.”

  They never found the Rehnquist, but as the Archbishop pointed out, “the perpetrator may have confederates.”

  Everybody tried to remember who had been sitting in the extreme right of the first pew. They carefully made up a list, including everybody’s separate memories, half-memories, or pseudo-memories. The list looked like this:

  Lord and Lady Bugge

  the Hon. Guy Fawkeshunt, M.P. and

  Eva Gebloomenkraft

  Ken Campbell and Eva Gebloomenkraft

  the Hon. Fission Chips, F.R.S. and

  Eva Gebloomenkraft

  “One name seems to stand out, doesn’t it?” asked His Eminence.

  “Eva Gebloomenkraft,” said a deacon. “Isn’t she that Jet Set millionairess who got into so much trouble in Unistat two years ago for putting laughing gas in the air conditioning system at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?”

  The sudden death of Bonny Benedict created waves of confusion and apprehension far beyond what ordinarily would have resulted from such a tragic accident.

  The first one affected was Polly Esther Doubleknit, who called down from her executive office to the City Desk at once.

  “What the hell happened to Bonny?” she demanded.

  The City Editor spoke in a hoarse croak. “It seems to be what the TV news said, a heart attack.” He was beginning to feel that he’d be the next victim, since his blood pressure seemed to be rising every minute.

  “A heart attack?” Polly Esther was dumbfounded. “But what about the man?”

  “He’s being held, of course,” the City Editor said. “But God knows what they’ll charge him with—manslaughter, negligent homicide, who knows? There’s never been a case like this before.”

  “They had better charge him with something,” Polly Esther said crisply. “Or this paper will land on the D.A.’s office with all four feet. Do I make myself clear?”

  Admiral Babbit nearly jumped out of his skin when the news reached Washington.

  “It’s those Briggsing Bryanting faggots from Alexandria!” he screamed. “And they’re gonna try to pin it on us!”

  This was a defensive over-reaction caused by the fact that Old Iron Balls had been contemplating various ways of bringing about the demise of Ms. Benedict. But he distrusted Einstein and neuroanalysis—“Jewish egghead stuff”—and never realized that most of his mentations consisted of defensive over-reactions.

  “I’ll fix those Rehnquist-suckers,” he said to an aide. “Get old de la Plume, and tell him I’ve got a big job for him.”

  This referred to Mr. Shemus de la Plume, Naval Intelligence’s ace handwriting forger.

  And so, within thirty-six hours, the Washington Post had come into possession of a diary, allegedly written by John Disk, the man who had killed Bonny Benedict. The diary only looked cryptic at first glance. With a little study, anybody with at least two inches of forehead could figure out, from the abbreviations and clumsy codes used, that Disk had been an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  This was quite a shock to both Disk and the CIA, who had never had any connection with each other.

  Actually, Disk had been raised in the True Holy Roman Catholic Church, a bizarre fascistoid splinter group which had broken with the Vatican during the reign of Pope Stephen of Dublin.

  When Disk reached his adolescence in the early 1970s, however, strange things began to happen to him. At first he thought it was demons—he had seen The Exorcist and believed every bit of it—but his priest told him it was all because he kept Lourding himself.

  Disk went to Confession every time he gave in to the temptation to Lourde-off, which was five times a week after he reached seventeen, and the priest kept telling him to use Self-Control and take cold showers. The priest also said that all the demons were in hell and Johnny should stop worrying about them.

  The only people who believed in demonic possession, the priest said, were the benighted fanatics in the Orthodox Holy Roman Catholic Church.

  Everybody in the True Holy Roman Catholic Church despised and hated the members of the Orthodox Holy Roman Catholic Church, which was another splinter group that had broken away from the Vatican during the reign of Pope Stephen. The members of the Orthodox Holy Roman Catholic Church hated them back, you can be sure. In fact, in the typical manner of splinter groups, they each hated the other more than they hated the common enemy, the heretics in the Vatican.

  John Disk finally decided that what was wrong with him was not caused by demons and—since he was able to cut down on his Lourding-off to only twice a week after he passed twenty—it wasn’t entirely caused by Sin, either.

  He was being poisoned.

  The reason he had cycles of agitation and elation, followed by cycles of anxiety and growing fear that everything was somehow unreal, was because he was eating an Impure diet.

  The reason there were wars and rumors of wars, and revolutions and depressions, and pornography and lewd, sinful women in immodest clothing on every street was because all the food was full of toxic, mind-destroying chemicals.

  The people responsible for this were the Triangular Commission, the Power Elite, the Elders of Zion, the Bavarian Illuminati, and the American Medical Association.

  He had learned this by reading books on Organic Diet from bookstores run by the John Birch Society, the Natural Hygienists, the Purity of Ecology Party, and various other groups who were inclined to go through cycles of agitation, elation, anxiety, feelings of unreality, etc., and had realized this was caused by Impurity of Essence in their food.

  John Disk read a great deal of this literature and changed his mind about twenty times before he finally decided which school of “correct nutrition” was really correct.

  He decided Purity of Ecology was the group that really knew what the hell was going on. He believed every word in Unsafe Wherever You Go by POE’s founder, Furbish Lousewart.

  By the age of twenty-three, Disk was a typical POE member. When not putting in his thirty hours a week working in their printing plant—where he received lodging and an Organic Diet in lieu of pay—he was out on the streets selling their newspaper, Doom, or giving away their four-page mini-pamphlets, which had titles like Poison in Every Pot; Science: Satan’s Plot Against God and Man; and Jimmy Carter, Servant of the Jesuit-Zionist Conspiracy.

  POE hated President Carter because he had defeated Furbish Lousewart in the 1980 election. But, with the typical logic of splinter groups, they did not hate Carter nearly as much as they hated Eve Hubbard, of the Libertarian Immortalist Party, who also got more votes than Lousewart, even though she came in third.

  The POE people hated the Libertarian Immortalists for another reason, which was that the LIP platform was blasphemous and unpatriotic.

  Hubbard’s slogan was “No more death and taxes.”

  She planned to end taxes by running the government like a profit-sharing corporation, terminating all interference in the internal affairs of other countries (thus allowing the military budget to be cut every year, instead of growing every year), and paying each citizen a dividend on the profits the Unistat Corporation earned through investing in space colonization to tap into the vast energy and resources of Free Space.

  Hubbard planned to end death by investing the profits from space in longevity research, which the majority of scientists in the field were now convinced could lead to doubling or tripling the human life span in the first generation, and could lead to indefinite expansion thereafter.

  The POE people realized that
these proposals were scientific and rational.

  They therefore regarded them as Satanic.

  After three years in POE, John Disk still had cycles of agitation and unreality; but the leaders of the cult assured him that it took at least that long for the poisons in his previous diet to leave his system totally. If he stayed on the correct POE diet, they insisted, he would become as serene as they were.

  Still, things were getting to be more unreal more of the time. Disk looked in the mirror one morning, combing his hair, and seemed to see a middle-aged man looking out at him. It was only a flash, a single crack in the fabric of time, but it was unnerving. When the face turned back to his own—young, black-haired, pale—he wondered for a wild moment if he were truly a young man who had had a vision of himself twenty years older or a middle-aged man who was now having a hallucination of himself twenty years younger.

  But that was only a short fugue, for in a moment he recognized that the face in the mirror was not his twenty-years-later, but rather a face that had adorned the cover of Time magazine a few months ago. It was the face of Dr. Francis Dashwood, president of Orgasm Research Inc., Commie pervert Satanist sinner who spent most of his time observing things that John would like to do but was afraid to do because of twenty years of conditioning by the True Holy Roman Catholic Church.

  Which was bad enough, certainly, but not as bad as what was to come: voices at first so faint as to be barely perceptible, but slowly and insidiously growing louder, voices which were female and kept saying You are George Dorn and Imagine you can see my Brownmillers through my sweater and The interpenetration of the universes has begun, but mostly saying over and over You are George Dorn.

  And there were occasions, only a second in external time but stretching to infinity in a multiple of new dimensions he found or created within, when the Sages would gather him into their Maybe realm (“In addition to a Yes and a No, the universe contains a Maybe” was the password to pass the Lurker at the Threshold) and there would be Jesus saying “Is it not written, Ye are Gods?” and Emperor Norton saying “I just made myself Emperor of Unistat, Protector of Mexico, and King of the Jews,” and Ped Xing saying “There are many universes and mind-states” and Beethoven singing the evolutionary scenario in eight cycles and Great Chtulhu’s Starry Wisdom Band and Glorious Lucifer Son of the Morning who had never fallen because the message of the scriptures was written backward in a mirror and then Linda Lovelace would come in and start doing disgusting immoral things and he would be back, the splinter of eternity contracting the Euclidean 3-D, standing on a street handing out Poison in Every Pot and wondering if he was losing his mind.

  But the good parts of it were so good, Jesus and the weird but wise Emperor Norton and some of the Space Brothers, that he wished it would continue, if only it didn’t keep turning into that sinful and disgusting business about Linda Lovelace; but he was beginning to figure it out; he was not the fool they thought him—not by a long shot. He knew that, now that the poisons in the food were beginning to wear off. They had started aiming an electronic Thought Control machine at his brain, so he did not pay attention no matter how many times the seductive female voice said YOU ARE GEORGE DORN YOU ARE GEORGE DORN YOU ARE GEORGE DORN.

  So when he had read that bitch, that Briggsing Bryanting whore for the Big Corporations and the Sex Educators and Cattle Mutilators of the Satanist-Vatican-Zionist conspiracy, that lying tool of the Establishment, that contemptible Bonny Benedict claiming that Furbish Lousewart was a hypocrite and a meat-eater, claiming it when he knew it was not, could not be, true, damn her, the pig whore of the Jew-Jesuit money powers, as if a real Christian American like Furbish would pollute his body, the temple of God, with the flesh of a dead animal, the lying whore, he knew he would fix her and fix her good and proper, and show them all, the demonic jackal-headed lot of them with their laser beams flashing into his brain saying YOU ARE GEORGE DORN YOU ARE GEORGE DORN.

  So he knew the perfect thing, the only way to express total contempt for the pig Establishment, the great lessons of the sages of the Clownological Counter-Culture, the attack that frightened, punished, and humiliated all at once and yet had to be endured as “only a joke,” the bitch, that would fix her.

  So he bought the pie, a Boston Cream special that was “rich and thick,” according to the sign in the bakery, and waited for her in the morning outside the New York News-Times-Post-etc., and when the bitch, the lying whore, got out of her limousine, he was ready, he stepped forward, and he let her have it SMASH right in the face.

  But then the old lady—my God, she looked like his mother, he realized—started choking and wheezing and fell down on the sidewalk and he knew. He knew even before the cop arrived from the corner, even before the crowd told the cop in great anger and outrage what had happened, even before the ambulance arrived, even before the doctor said, “She’s gone.”

  And then the cop looked at him and he knew all the rest of it, the booking and the fingerprinting and the mug shot and then being alone in the cell all night with the voices saying YOU ARE GEORGE DORN.

  Things were coming to a head.

  Nathaniel F. X. Drest, secret chief of the Unistat Sector CIA, had felt uneasy for a long time. Since the death of President Carter, in fact. It wasn’t just that the then-Vice President, now-President, Hugh Crane, was right out of nowhere, a total unknown, not one of THEM; similar situations had arisen a few times in the past, and the novice had easily been initiated into the secret science of Strange Loops and Mind Control, seduced—without the necessity of bribery, cajolery, or threats—into gladly becoming one of THEM. No: the unsettling thing was that Carter’s death was unplanned, random, a surprise to everyone; it might even have been due to natural causes.

  Yes: things were definitely and bodaciously coming to a head.

  Nathaniel Drest had not lasted as secret chief of the CIA for thirty years without acquiring great pragmatic savvy about the spooky side of predestination. “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action” had been the motto of one of the great masters of Strange Loops, Ian Fleming himself; but Drest knew that what was really going on was far weirder than even Fleming could comprehend.

  Behind the mild, professorial, bespectacled facade of Nathaniel Drest, officially listed as economics researcher in the budget reports, was the one man capable of serving as secret chief of the Unistat CIA through thirty long years, while one dummy after another posed as the official head of the clandestine organization. Drest was a philosopher and a visionary; he had forged, from Machiavelli, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Mussolini, Nietzsche, Napoleon, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Three Legendary Sages—Turing, Fleming, Wheatley—the coldly logical, existential, pragmatic strategy for eternal rule by himself and his friends in THEM, and total extermination and eradication of all possibility of rebellion by the rest of humanity.

  He had been told once, by a sociobiologist, that he was a giant DNA robot, programmed to advance the growth and expansion of his gene pool. He thought that was an amusing, although limited, view of what was going on; and he certainly had no interest in such evolutionary theories as justifications of what he did. He needed no justifications; that his goals were rationally desirable to him was all that was necessary or profitable to contemplate.

  The world certainly deserved to be ruled by his gene pool, by those White Anglo-Saxon Presbyterians and Episcopalians who had gone to Groton and Harvard, and occasionally there would be room for a bright boy from Yale, and this was so obvious that it needed no long-range evolutionary justifications. You just had to look around the world to see that no other gene pool was smart enough, tough enough, and fundamentally liberal enough to do the job justly and wisely.

  John Ruskin and Cecil Rhodes had seen the choice a century ago; a world ruled by one Anglo oligarchy on scientific and socialist principles, or a world of anarchy and chaos, with constant wars and revolutions. Of course, there had been some anarchy, chaos, wars, and revolutions since Drest had taken over,
but that was due to surviving ideological poisons on the international system and would be cured when the planet had been on the correct, Drest-directed mental diet for a few more decades.

  But things were coming to a head.

  The damned Ruskies still obstinately clung to their obsolete Adam Smith economics, and much of the Islamic world was unruly and rebellious. But worst of all was the Discordian Society.

  Drest knew all about the Discordian Society, or thought he did. He was convinced they were behind this latest attempt to discredit the Company with that forged diary linking them to the Bonny Benedict “Cream Pie” murder. He also believed that they were the secret organization behind all the lesser conspiracies that annoyed and sometimes frustrated him—the malignantly nihilistic Network that had Potter Stewarted his own computer and God knows how many other computers, the dupes in POE and the Libertarian Immortalist Party, the damned moralistic meddlesome Stephenites, Weather Underground, the traitors over at Naval Intelligence, the sinister Invisible Hand Society, the terroristic Morituri, and the damned Ruskies and Arabs.

  Drest had first learned about the Discordian Society in a strange, obscene, subversive novel called Illuminatus! He was convinced it was all fiction at first. But then he discovered that the alleged Bible of the Discordians, the perverse and paradoxical Principia Discordia, actually existed. When he put two men on the case they soon reported that copies of the Principia could be found in many science-fiction and libertarian bookstores all over Unistat, and that it could be ordered through the mail from a company absurdly and disarmingly named Loom-panics Unlimited in Port Townsend, Washington.

  Of course he wanted to believe that was all there was to it, just a small, oddball cult no more likely to influence events than the Libertarian Immortalists were. But then bit by bit the damning details accumulated. Emperor Joshua Norton, King of the Jews, was a Discordian saint, and Emperor Norton was also inexplicably becoming an “in” person. There was a play about Emperor Norton running in San Francisco, posters celebrating him for sale all over the country. The Discordian mantra “Fnord” was seen scrawled on walls in more and more places, and on the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill. Characters in Illuminatus!, who he had assumed were fictional, often appeared writing book or movie reviews for various magazines, and a check showed that they had been writing letters to the Playboy Forum and the Chicago newspapers since the early 1960s. Discordian cabals appeared in England, Germany, Japan, Australia, and the most unlikely places.