Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history—brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs. Many of the pioneer Discordians were computer programmers (he remembered that fact every time the Company’s computer answered a simple program with GIVE ME A COOKIE or THE GOVERNMENT SUCKS) and others had documented links with the Libertarian Immortalists, the LSD subculture, and groups as sinister as the witches and the anarchists.

  The Discordians believed that God was a Crazy Woman. For the Woman part of it, they used the usual Taoist and Feminist arguments about the Creative Force being dark, female, subtle, fecund, and in every way opposite to Male Authoritarianism. For the Crazy part, they pointed to Pickering’s Moon, which goes around backward, to rains of crabs and periwinkles and live snakes, to the paradoxes of quantum theory, and to the religious and political behavior of humanity itself, all of which, they claimed, demonstrated that the fabric of reality was a mosaic of chaos, confusion, deception, delusion, and Strange Loops.

  And, Drest knew, they were definitely linked with the Network. Although computer specialists only spoke of the Network in whispers, the Company had a detailed file on them. The Network was devoted to the long-suppressed, much persecuted, but persistent underground religion of cocaine founded by the eccentric physician Sigmund Freud. They devoutly believed in the literal truth of Freud’s vision of the Superman. (“What is man? A bridge between the primate and the superman—a bridge over an abyss,” Freud wrote in his Diary of a Hope Fiend.) To achieve the Superman, the Network was systematically frustrating every other group of conspirators on the planet by glitching the computers, and meanwhile diverting funds from legitimate activities to subsidize dissident scientists engaged in research on immortality and higher intelligence. “Cocaine is a memory of the future” was the sick slogan of this misguided group of deranged intellectuals. “Our minds will function as ecstatically as on cocaine, without the jitters, once we achieve immortality and learn to repro-gram our brains as efficiently as we reprogram our computers,” they went on. “When we don’t have to die and can constantly increase our awareness of detail,” they also said, “we will have no more problems, only adventures.”

  Naturally, every government in the world, even the near-anarchistic Free Market maniacs in Russia, had outlawed this bizarre cult.

  An even more sinister Discordian front organization, according to Drest’s coldly logical analysis of what was really going on, was the insidious Invisible Hand Society.

  What was most devious about the Invisible Hand-ers was that they disdained secrecy and operated right out in the open, telling everybody what they were doing and why and what they hoped to accomplish. They had offices in all major cities and gave free courses in their politico-economic system just like the old Henry George schools at the turn of the century.

  It was very hard for Drest to persuade the other eight Unknown Men who ruled the CIA in other parts of the world that the Invisible Hand was the most dangerous sort of conspiracy.

  “A conspiracy doesn’t operate in the open,” they kept reminding him. Sometimes they would tell him he was working too hard and should take a vacation.

  “That’s what’s so subtle and devilish about it,” Drest would explain, over and over. “Nobody can recognize a conspiracy that’s out in the open. It’s a kind of optical illusion that they’re using to undermine us.”

  “But they don’t believe we exist,” he would be told.

  “That’s an oversimplification,” he would insist. “They admit we exist and occupy space-time and so on. They just teach that all the titles we give ourselves are meaningless and all our acts are futile since the Invisible Hand controls everything, anyway.”

  The other eight would again suggest that Drest needed a vacation.

  Things were coming to a head.

  The first lesson given to people who signed up for the course of “Political and Economic Reality” at the Invisible Hand Society, Drest knew, concerned policemen and soldiers.

  Two men in blue uniforms would appear on the stage, carrying guns.

  “Blue uniforms are Real,” the lecturer would say. “Guns are Real. Policemen are a social fiction.”

  Three men in brown uniforms would appear, carrying rifles.

  “Brown uniforms are Real,” the lecturer would say. “Rifles are Real. Soldiers are a social fiction.”

  And so it would go, all through the lecture. Pure mind-rot, and, thank God, most people found it all so absurd, and yet so frightening, that they never came back for any of the subsequent lectures.

  But the people who did come back worried Drest; they were the types he loathed and feared. Like Cassius, they had a lean and hungry look and they thought too much.

  And they thought about the wrong things.

  And now there was the matter of the materializing-and-dematerializing Rehnquist, obviously a Discordian plot, in Drest’s estimation. What other group could conceive it, much less organize and accomplish it? Fnord, indeed!

  There had been the case of the Ambassador who found it on a staircase; and the antipornography crusader who encountered it, temporarily painted red, white, and blue, floating in a bowl of Fruit Punch; and that unspeakable incident involving His Eminence the Very Reverend Archbishop of Canterbury; and God knows how many other cases the Company had never heard about.

  And President Crane was said to be far more of an oddball than anybody had realized, having strange groups for midnight meetings in the Oval Room, where incense was burned in profusion, and the Secret Service men claimed to hear strange chants that sounded, they said, like “Yog-Sothoth Neblod Zin”

  Things were coming to a head.

  THE OLD-TIME RELIGION

  Charles Windsor, Prince of Wales, was about to be crowned King of England.

  It was a sacred occasion for all British subjects, still grieving for the Queen Mother, who had passed away so suddenly. But in the midst of the mourning, there was much excitement, since Charles would obviously make a smashing king; he was bright, he was witty, he was good-looking, and he had sense enough not to meddle in politics.

  There was one discordant voice in the crowd outside Buckingham Palace waiting for the new king to return from the coronation at Westminster Abbey. This was a plump, stately young Irishman who kept singing, off key:

  O won’t we have a merry time

  Drinking whiskey, beer, and wine

  On coronation

  Coronation day

  Voices kept telling him to hush, but he would turn to such spoilsports and say dramatically, “The sacred pint alone is the lubrication of my Muse.”

  “Drunken ruffian,” somebody muttered.

  “Well, what if he is?” the Irishman said suavely. “He still looks like a king, and is that not what really matters?”

  “I wasn’t calling the king a drunken ruffian,” the voice protested, too emotionally.

  “’ere, now, who’s calling me bloody king a ruffian?” said a soldier. “I’ll knock the Potter Stewarting head off any Potter Stewarting Bryanter that says a word against me Potter Stewarting king!”

  “Hush,” another chorus joined in.

  “Don’t hush me, you Bryanting sods!”

  “It’s overcome I am entirely,” the Irishman said, “by the rolling eloquence of your lean, unlovely English. You were quoting Shakespeare, perchance?”

  “’ere, are you making sport of me, mate? I’ll wring your Bryanting Potter Stewarting neck, so I will …”

  “Here he comes!” somebody shouted.

  And other voices took up the cry: “The king! The king!”

  Eva Gebloomenkraft, certainly the loveliest woman in the crowd, had been listening to all this with her own private amusement, but now she reached down and began to open her purse, a bit stealthily, perhaps, yet not quite stealthily enough, it seemed, for another hand c
losed abruptly over hers.

  “Rumpole, CID, Scotland Yard,” said a voice, as a badge was flashed briefly. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come along, miss.”

  The Archbishop of Canterbury had shared his suspicions about Ms. Gebloomenkraft with the Yard, and they had been on the lookout for her all through coronation day.

  But when they had her back in the interrogation room on Bow Street, there was no Rehnquist in her purse.

  “I sold it,” she said after an hour of interrogation. And, at their baffled expressions, she added, “It was becoming a bore. The joke was wearing thin. I needed something else to excite me.”

  “That’s why you do it, then?” Inspector Rumpole asked. “For excitement?”

  Eva raised weary eyes. “When you have so much money that you can literally hire anybody to do literally anything, life does become tedious,” she said. “It requires some imagination, then, to restore zest to existence.”

  And all she had in her purse was a self-inflating balloon, which, when the cap was crushed, expanded to a sphere nearly twenty feet in diameter bearing the slogan, in huge psychedelic colors:

  OVERALL THERE IS A SMELL OF FRIED ONIONS

  When next recorded the itinerant Rehnquist was in the possession of Lady Sybiline Greystoke, who had either purchased it directly from Ms. Gebloomenkraft or had acquired it from some go-between.

  Lady Sybiline was an eccentric, even for the British nobility. She was so far to the right, politically, that she regarded the Magna Carta as dangerously radical. She was so High Church that she referred to Charles I as “Saint Charles the Martyr.” She hunted lions, in Africa, and was a crack shot. She was also, secretly, president of the Sappho Society, the group of aristocratic Lesbians who had secretly governed England, behind the scenes, since their founder, Elizabeth I.

  Lady Sybiline and her good and intimate friend, Lady Rose Potting-Shedde, evidently found great amusement, between them, with the Rehnquist, for they even took it with them when Lady Sybiline embarked, that summer, for her annual lion hunt in Kenya.

  Their White Hunter on that expedition was a red-faced man named Robert Wilson, who, like Clem Cotex, knew he was living in a book.

  Robert Wilson had discovered this when somebody showed him the book in question. It was called Great Short Stories and was by some Yank named Hemingway. And there he was, Robert Wilson, playing a featured role in the very first story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

  It was a shock, at first, to see himself in a book, and it was a bit thick to find his drinking and his red face described so dispassionately. It was like seeing yourself on the telly, suddenly observing the-man-who-was-you from outside.

  Then Wilson discovered that he was in another book, but changed in totally arbitrary ways that verged on surrealism. This book was a bit of tommyrot and damned filth called The Universe Next Door, and he was, in fact, both inside it and outside it, being both the author of it and a character in it.

  Robert Wilson began to experience cycles of agitation, elation, anxiety, and a growing sense of unreality.

  Then came Lady Sybiline and Lady Rose and that mysterious object they kept in a small box and kept joking about, obscurely, between themselves.

  They called it Marlon Brando.

  The river had pebbles at the bottom. They were shiny and small and the water rushed over them constantly and you could see clear to the other side of it if you had your glasses on and weren’t too drunk. Robert Wilson stared at the pebbles, thinking they were like pearls, trying not to remember what had happened that morning.

  “After all, it was a clean kill,” Lady Sybiline said beside him. He wished she wouldn’t talk. He wished she would go away and take Marlon Brando with her.

  “The hills, in the distance,” she said. “They look like white rhinoceri.”

  “They look like white rhinoceri,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “The bloody hills don’t look at all like rhinoceri,” he said. “They have no horns, for one thing. No exoskeleton on the head. I never heard such a damned silly thing. They look like elephants, actually.”

  “Stop it,” she said. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “It was bloody bad,” he said. “Bloody awful bad.”

  “If it hadn’t happened, would it be cute, then, for me to say the hills look like white rhinoceri?”

  “It wouldn’t be cute no matter what happened.”

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s like that.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s like that.”

  “Will you please please stop repeating everything I say?”

  The water kept running, always running, over the pebbles that were like pearls.

  “It was bad,” he said again. “Bloody awful bad.”

  “Are you always this rude to your clients?”

  “Oh, it comes down to that,” he said. “The hired help have to keep a polite tongue in their heads. You bloody English.”

  “You’re English yourself,” she said.

  “I’m part Irish. I wish I were all Irish now.”

  “Really. You don’t have to go on like this. Everybody is a little bit … eccentric.”

  That was the kind of whining excuse he despised. He knew then that he was going to be brutal. Somebody had to teach them.

  “English literature,” he said. “There is none in this century.”

  She cringed. He knew he had reached her.

  “Stop it,” she said.

  “Everything worth reading is by Irishmen,” he said. “Padraic Colum. Beckett. O’Casey.”

  “Stop it. Stop it.”

  “Behan. Bernard Shaw. O’Flaherty.”

  “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.”

  “I’m stopping,” he said. “I feel that I’ve said all this before somewhere, already. But how could you do it?”

  “It excites me,” she said. “To have … Marlon … there … while I’m firing at a lion.”

  He shook his head. “You are a five-letter woman,” he said wearily.

  But then the Rehnquist mysteriously disappeared again, back in Nairobi, while Lady Sybiline and Lady Rose were staying at the glamorous new Mau Mau Hilton.

  Lady Sybiline was furious, but frustrated. There was no way of asking the hotel to question its employees about the theft without describing the object that had been stolen, and that was, of course, potentially embarrassing.

  But she and Lady Rose had lots of other exciting little games, and they soon forgot all about “Marlon Brando.”

  Especially after they bought a beautiful plastic-and-rubber imitation which they christened “David Bowie.”

  It wasn’t really theft, of course; Indole Ringh was a pious and holy man who would never steal anything. It was his religious duty, as he conceived it, to remove the holy relic from the heathens and return it to its rightful homeland.

  Indole Ringh was a brown, gnarled, perpetually smiling little man, the offspring of ten generations of very conservative Hindus who had never accepted English ideas or ideals.

  He had, in fact, three personalities. One was just an ordinary Hindu nobleman who was always smiling. The second, when he was in Samadhi, was an awe-inspiring guru, no more human than a statue of Brahma. The third, when he was in Dhyana, was just the brightest, quickest, most curious monkey in the jungle.

  He didn’t believe in any of those personalities; he just watched them come and go, blandly indifferent.

  Because he practiced hatha yoga, bhakti yoga, rajah yoga, and gnana yoga, and because he smoked a great deal of bhang, he was as conscious of detail as Clem Cotex or the late Pope Stephen. Because he believed the oldest Vedas were the important ones, he had no truck with modernistic notions of aceticism, British prudery, or heathen Missionary nonsense of any sort.

  He was a devout worshiper of Shiva, god of sex, intoxication, death, and transformation. He believed that you couldn’t come to your senses until you went out of your mind. He kept alive, within
his own province, the ancient cult of Shiva-Kali, the divine couple whose embrace generated the whole play of existence.

  And now, in Nairobi of all places, he had found, somehow in the possession of a heathen Englishwoman, the most sacred of all lost relics—the Shivalingam itself, the engine of the creative lightning.

  So it was not theft at all; he was merely restoring the relic to the place where it belonged, in India.

  In fact, he placed it on the altar in his own temple, and invited the whole province to come see it and marvel and know the power of the Divine Shiva, who possessed such a tool of creativity.

  He was going to restore the old-time religion.

  He made a speech to the assembled multitude on the first day the Shivalingam was displayed in the temple. He told them that the polarity of Shiva and Kali was the basic pulse of creation. He said the Chinese dimly discerned this in their yin and yang symbolism, and the heathen West in their concept of positively and negatively charged particles. He explained that the male-female polarity was the engine of creation, not just in the human and animal kingdoms, but in every aspect of nature. He said that Samadhi and Dhyana and normal consciousness were equally real, equally unreal, and equally pointless, but that if you contemplated this Shivalingam long enough it wouldn’t matter whether you understood any of this or not.

  He was so bombed on bhang that he kept going into Samadhi every few minutes during this, and the crowd, both his old disciples and newcomers, decided he was the wisest and holiest man in all India.

  Old Ringh kept smiling and going into Samadhi and explaining that we are all bisexual immortals who inhabit many universes and mind-states, and the crowd kept cheering and getting higher on his vibes, and finally they all went into the temple and contemplated the Shivalingam, where Indole Ringh had placed it on the altar, facing the enormous carving of the sacred yoni of the Black Goddess, Kali, and under the faded photograph of the Wise Man from the West, General Crowley, who, even though an English heathen, had understood the Mysteries and had spent many hours, while smoking bhang, discussing with Ringh’s father how, even in mathematics, the sacred yoni appeared in both the shape and the substance of 0, the void, while the lingam appeared in the shape and substance of 1, the creative lightning, and how, out of the union of the 0 and 1, all of the numbers of creation could be generated in binary notation.