Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  There were murmurs of agreement. But then Professor Fred “Fidgets” Digits spoke up suddenly: “This opens a whole new can of worms,” he said. “If General Crowley was—well, what he now appears to be, a common hoaxter—well, gentlemen, can we trust his reports on the North Pole expedition?”

  “I fear not,” Clem Cotex said. “That question came to me as soon as I began to realize Crowley’s true character. We can’t believe the North Pole story at all. It may just be another of his jokes. We may have been wrong for years, gentlemen.

  “The earth may not be hollow, after all.”

  Down the hall the Invisible Hand Society was having problems of its own.

  A group of the more avant-garde members had become convinced of the existence of the Tooth Fairy and were trying to convert everybody else.

  Naturally, Dr. Rauss Elysium did not like this. He felt it reduced the principles of the Invisible Hand Society to absurdity.

  Dr. Rauss Elysium had summed up the entire science of economics in four propositions, to wit:

  1. Find out who profits from it.

  This was merely a restatement of the old Latin proverb—a favorite of Lenin’s—cui bono?

  2. Groups never meet together except to conspire against other groups.

  This was a generalization of Adam Smith’s more limited proposition “Men of the same profession never meet together except to defraud the general public.” Dr. Rauss Elysium had realized that it applies not just to merchants, but to groups of all sorts, including the governmental sector.

  4. Every system evolves and expands until it encroaches upon other systems.

  This was just a simplification of most of the discoveries of ecology and General Systems Theory.

  4. It all returns to equilibrium, eventually.

  This was based on a broad Evolutionary Perspective and was the basic faith of the Invisible Hand mystique. Dr. Rauss Elysium had merely recognized that the Invisible Hand, first noted by Adam Smith, operates everywhere. The Invisible Hand, Dr. Rauss Elysium claimed, does not merely function in a free market, as Smith had thought, but continues to control everything no matter how many conspiracies, in or out of government, attempt to frustrate it. Indeed, by including Propositions 2 and 3 inside the perspective of this Proposition 4, it was obvious—at least to him—that conspiracy, government interference, monopoly, and all other attempts to frustrate the Invisible Hand were themselves part of the intricate, complex working of the Invisible Hand itself.

  He was an economic Taoist.

  The Invisible Hand-ers were bitterly hated by the orthodox old Libertarians. The old Libertarians claimed that the Invisible Hand-ers had carried Adam Smith to the point of self-contradiction.

  The Invisible Hand people, of course, denied that.

  “We’re not telling you not to oppose the government,” Dr. Rauss Elysium always told them. “That’s your genetic and evolutionary function; just as it’s the government’s function to oppose you.”

  “But,” the Libertarians would protest, “if you don’t join us, the government will evolve and expand indefinitely.”

  “Not so,” Dr. Rauss Elysium would say, with supreme Faith. “It will only evolve and expand until it creates sufficient opposition. Your coalition is that sufficient opposition at this time and place. If it were not sufficient, there would be more of you.”

  Some Invisible Hand-ers, of course, eventually quit and returned to orthodox Libertarianism.

  They said that, no matter how hard they looked, they couldn’t see the Invisible Hand.

  “You’re not looking hard enough,” Dr. Rauss Elysium told them. “You’ve got to notice every little detail.”

  Sometimes, he would point out, ironically, that many had abandoned Libertarianism to become socialists or other kinds of Statists because they couldn’t see the Invisible Hand even in the Free Market of the nineteenth century.

  All they could see, he said, were the conspiracies of the big capitalists to prevent free competition and to maintain their monopolies. They, the fools, had believed government intervention would stop this.

  Government intervention was, to Dr. Rauss Elysium, just like the conspiracies of the corporations, merely another aspect of the Invisible Hand.

  “It all coheres wonderfully,” he never tired of repeating. “Just notice all the details.”

  Alas, the Tooth Fairy people were using all the same arguments. They said that if you couldn’t see the Tooth Fairy, you weren’t looking hard enough.

  HONG KONG DONG

  The fame of Indole Ringh’s marvelous temple with the legendary Shivalingam soon spread throughout India, and pilgrims came from hundreds of miles away to look and wonder.

  The new cult did not last long, however, because some miscreant crept into the temple one dark night and stole the Shivalingam.

  The multitudes were horrified, and even wrathful, when the theft was discovered the following morning, but old Indole Ringh, smiling and spaced out, made a little speech that calmed them all.

  “Miracles, like all other things,” he said, “come out of the Void for no reason and return to the Void for no reason. Wait. Be patient. Pay attention to the little details. And see what comes out of the Void next.”

  Actually, the Shivalingam was not exactly returned to the Void, but had merely been transported to Hong Kong.

  The King Kong Dong had been brought to Hong Kong by the unsavory person named Chi Ken Teriyaki, who was wanted by the authorities in Japan for selling “American” cigarettes made in Taiwan, diluted shark-repellent, stocks and bonds in a tapioca mine in Nutley, New Jersey, cocaine cut with Clorox, forged copies of the now high-priced El Mir forgeries of Van Gogh, and similarly dubious merchandise. Chi Ken, a half-Chinese, half-Japanese hoodlum, had originally worked for the infamous Fu Manchu and was later part of the notorious Casper Gutman mob in Istanbul. Fallen on lean days, he now eked out a bare living as a police informer in Hong Kong and part-time actor in underground Okinawan porn movies.

  Chi Ken purloined the ithyphallic eidolon from Indole Ringh’s temple of Shiva because he knew of a fabulously rich man in Hong Kong who happened to be looking for just such an item.

  Hong Kong at that time, like most of the Orient, was haunted by the specter of the “boat people,” refugees from Unistat who had crossed the Pacific in hopes of a better life. There was no nation in the East willing to accept more than a handful of these pitiful people, and most of them just drifted from harbor to harbor, slowly starving, and hoping for acceptance somewhere.

  These desperate people were fleeing the appalling conditions that prevailed in Unistat since Furbish Lousewart became President in 1980.

  The man Chi Ken Teriyaki was going to see was named Wing Lee Chee, and he was a deep, dense, secretive person, even more inscrutable than the average Chinese businessman.

  Wing Lee Chee had been an athlete in his youth and had even toured Unistat once, performing amazing karate feats in a carnival. His missing right eye (the black patch made him even more inscrutable) was said to be due to an unfortunate incident that had occurred when the carnival was in Bad Ass, Texas, and he tried to use the white washroom at a gas station.

  Mr. Wing had returned to China, and thence to Hong Kong, and had grown fat and rich by prosecuting what he considered a judicious and appropriate campaign of revenge against Unistat. He mass-manufactured fake T’ang dynasty art, to swindle the Unistat millionaires. He was the highest-paid informant for the CIA’s Far East office, and, due to his knowledge of Unistat, always turned in information that confirmed the paranoid fantasies of his employers but had no connection with what was actually going on anywhere. Through a series of fronts, he had taken over organized crime in Unistat and arranged that everybody would blame it on the Sicilians.

  He was currently engaged in smuggling as many as one thousand of the “boat people” a month into Hong Kong, where he put them to work in his factories and paid them three cents a day.

  Wing Lee Chee, at eighty-seven
, was a philosopher and a man of balance. His life-style always tempered severity with mercy, larceny with generosity, sensuality with meditation. He always tried to be as just a man as was compatible with being a rich and comfortable man.

  If one of the employees in his factories showed initiative or talent, Wing Lee Chee noticed, and that man or woman was quickly promoted to a position of responsibility and solvency. He was no xenophobe; this policy applied even to Japanese, Hindus, and the wretched Unistat refugees.

  Mr. Wing lived on Peach Blossom Street and had a magnificent view of all of Hong Kong and the harbor. He felt that the view was making him more philosophical every year. Each evening, after his twilight meditation period, he would sit at his window, smoking a long black Italian cigar, and look down at the teeming human hive below him, thinking that every person down there was the center of a whole universe, just like himself.

  He had learned total detachment from all his own emotions in one split second, the day the white cops in Bad Ass knocked his eye out while arresting him. He had known, in that second, that he could kill them all—no man in the world knew more of aikido, judo, kung fu, and karate than Wing Lee Chee in his youth—but he knew what would happen after that if he did it. He looked at his own rage, understood suddenly in a mini-Satori that this was a mechanical-chemical process in his body, and became the clear mind that watched the rage instead of the emotional mind that experienced it. All of the more mystical and obscure things his martial arts teachers had tried to teach him abruptly made sense. He was never the same man again.

  So he would sit, in the early evenings, smoking his foul Italian cigars (a taste acquired from a business associate named Celine) and look down at Hong Kong and its myriad of robots, each driven by mechanical and chemical reflexes, each believing itself the center of the universe. And then he would laugh softly at his own sense of superiority, because he knew that he was also controlled by chemical chains that determined what he could and could not think. Only in very deep meditation, and only a few times, had he broken those chains and seen—briefly! how briefly!—what the hell was really going on, outside of his own mental card-index system.

  But Wing Lee Chee always came out of those high moments giggling foolishly, like a mental defective, or weeping quietly at the stupidity of himself and the rest of humanity, or simply dazed, like a man who opens the door to his own bedroom and finds himself lost in one of the craters of the moon.

  On September 23, 1986, Wing Lee Chee had two important visitors in his office.

  The first was the robot who used the name Frank Sullivan. Wing Lee Chee gave him a neatly typed report full of nonsense and mythology about Far Eastern affairs, which Sullivan would dutifully turn in to Nathaniel Drest at CIA headquarters in Alexandria; Drest would worry even more that the Discordians were taking over the world.

  Sullivan gave Wing Lee Chee a cashiers check for twenty thousand dollars, from U.S. Silicon and Sherbet, which was the CIA front for payments made to the Far East sector. Sullivan also gave Wing a check for one hundred thousand dollars, from Universal Synergetics Inc., which was the front for the heroin industry’s payments to the Far East. Mr. Wing gave Sullivan a small ticket, which would pass him into a warehouse where the bricks of pure opium would be turned over to him, to be transported via the Corsican Mafia to France, where it would be refined into heroin, shipped to New York, and seized by a cop named Popeye Doyle. The last part of the process, the intrusive Doyle, was not part of the plan, but happened, anyway, to one shipment in two hundred, and was part of the overhead.

  Mr. Wing liked pseudo-Sullivan, even though he knew the robot was not human. It was comforting to talk to an organism that possessed no emotions and saw everything clearly, down to every last tiny little detail.

  That ability to observe objectively was what made the robot such a superior Intelligence Agent, Wing Lee Chee surmised.

  The robot had, in fact, once been a human being.

  Then he joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where they sent him to Boot Camp and brainwashed him.

  The marines, of course, did not know that what they did was brainwashing. They called it “turning a civilian into a marine.” It consisted of breaking down every imprint and reflex in the brain, through stress, shock, and constant humiliation, and then imposing a new set of imprints and reflexes. All military organizations did it, and none of them knew it was brainwashing.

  The semirobotized, semihuman product of Boot Camp was then among the lucky twenty—or the unlucky twenty—to be chosen for special training by Naval Intelligence.

  He was then brainwashed a second time. The technicians who worked on him this time were more sophisticated than the Drill Instructors in Boot Camp, but they still didn’t like to call their work brainwashing. “Brainwashing,” they all felt, was what the enemy did. What they did was “turn a dumb marine into a trained Intelligence Agent.”

  They used stress, shock, indoctrination, hypnosis, LSD, and conditioning.

  The resulting humanoid subsequently defected to Russia and was brainwashed a third time by the KGB. What came up, of course, was a Strange Loop: under ordinary hypnosis, he appeared to be what he claimed to be, a sincere convert to the Russian way of life; under mind-drugs and deeper hypnosis, he was a Naval Intelligence agent, as the KGB suspected all along. They proceeded to brainwash him a fourth and fifth time, and he returned to Unistat to be debriefed and to serve as a sleeper agent for the KGB.

  Naval Intelligence then reprogrammed him again, digging out the third level that the KGB couldn’t reach. This level operated like a Trapdoor Code in a computer, and was inaccessible to anyone, including the programmed agent himself, except for those who knew the triggering word, which happened to be “Fishmonger,” because the Naval Intelligence psychologist who had devised this system was a Charles Fort fan.

  Naval Intelligence now had a man, or what had once been a man, who was accepted totally by the KGB as one of their very own, and who even defined himself that way to himself, but who was, at the word “Fishmonger,” an Objective Observer for Naval Intelligence. He was exactly the twenty-third to have gone through this Strange Loop.

  At this point the time-dwarfs from Zeta Reticuli got him with a classic Close Encounter of the Third Kind. All he ever remembered, and all he could tell either the KGB or Naval Intelligence, was that a flashing light had come out of the sky, he had been paralyzed, and then it was three days later and he was in another city. Everybody assumed that this was some brain spasm caused by the amount of imprinting and reimprinting he had gone through.

  But the Reticulans counted him as number 137 of their agents on Earth.

  All his ID identified him as Frank Sullivan, of Dublin, Ireland, and even when he went through the brainwashing, or “basic training,” as it was called, in the Provisional Irish Republican Army, that cover stood up.

  Neither he nor anyone else remembered, by 1987, that he had been born Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Wing Lee Chee’s second visitor that day was the unsavory Chi Ken Teriyaki, and their business was of a sort that most of the world would have regarded as extremely grisly and perverse.

  But when Teriyaki left, two thousand dollars richer, Wing Lee Chee was an extremely happy man. He canceled all his appointments for the day, summoned his chauffeur, and sped like a bullet to the home of Ying Kaw Foy, the youngest, the loveliest, and the most beloved of his three mistresses.

  “My youth has been restored,” he told the startled young lady. “I feel like a mere lad of forty-eight again! A whole new life is opening for us.”

  There was no mistaking the glint in the old man’s eye. “The ginseng worked?” Ms. Ying asked, delighted.

  “Well, not quite,” old Wing said carefully. “But this is almost as good. We can nearly Potter Stewart again.”

  “My little old darling,” Ms. Ying said. “I have told you that it gives me great pleasure to Briggs you, no matter how long it takes. And you Briggs me most deliciously and perfectly. And we are happy so, are we
not? And what do you mean by these strange words? How on earth does one nearly Potter Stewart?”

  Wing opened his package and showed her.

  “Good grief!” Ms. Ying cried. “You’ve had your agents mutilate Mick Jagger!” But then her eyes misted over. “You’d do anything to please me, wouldn’t you? You little old darling.”

  THE SYMPOSIUM

  When Simon Moon joined the Warren Belch Society, the effect was not additive, but synergetic. Simon the Walking Glitch added to minds like those of Clem Cotex and Blake Williams could only result in what a nineteenth-century philosopher had foreseen as “the transvaluation of all values.” A new cosmology, a new theology, a new eschatology, and even a new theory about the metaphysics of Krazy Kat emerged.

  Unfortunately, they all got so stoned that they could never remember afterward exactly what they had decided. It was like the legendary Cthulhucon of 1978 or 1979, which was supposed to have taken place in Arkham, Massachusetts. Every science-fiction fan in the country was alleged to have been there, and if they denied it, they were told that “the hash was so good almost everybody forgot everything that happened.” Nobody ever knew, for sure, if Cthulhucon had itself happened, or if it was just a hoax, a legend created by a minority to perplex and annoy the majority.

  Fortunately, or unfortunately, the Belchers all got together a week later to try to reconstruct their great discoveries.

  “I think,” Simon Moon ventured, “that we all sort of agreed that Tristan Tzara, writing poems by picking words out of a hat, created the whole modern esthetic, while Claude Shannon, generating Information Theory by picking words out of a hat, generated the correct approach to quantum mechanics.”

  “Jesus,” Blake Williams protested, “did I agree to that? What the hell were we smoking, anyway?”

  “Wait a minute,” Cotex said. “Simon has something, dammit! Didn’t we discover that there is a second flaw of thermodynamics as well as a second law?”