SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

by Robert Anton Wilson

  When they went to bed Simon was the more aggressive at first, Briggsing young Marion 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 Marion 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, psy-chometrics, 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?" Marion 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.

  Marion 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."

  Marion 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-dyna-mics-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?" Marion 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. / 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 a man 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 Marion Murphy.

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

  "Non lllegitimati carborundum," he muttere
d. It was his mantra against resentment, wrath, and other diseases of the ego.

  He leaned over and kissed Marion lightly on the ear.

  "Mrn," Marion 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 het-ero 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… But then, suddenly (hashish is full of surprises) Simon was weeping, remembering his father, Old Tim Moon, who had been a Wobbly organizer all his life, and Tim was singing "Joe Hill" again:

  The copper bosses killed you,

  Joe I never died, said he

  "Oh, Dad," Simon said aloud. "Why did you have to die, before I ever knew how much I loved you?" And suddenly he was all alone in an empty living room, weeping like an old man whose family and friends were all dead, holding his Social Security check and wondering: Where is the Federal bureau in charge of distributing love?

  Which was absurd: Simon had lots of friends, and he was just being morbid.

  "Oh, Dad"-he sniffed one more time-"I miss you."

  And then he stopped crying and went and put the Fugs' record of "Rameses the Second Is Dead, My Love" on the stereo. And floated with the music and the hash into a Country-and-Western Egyptian paradise:

  He's walking the fields where the Blessed live

  He's gone from Memphis to Heeeeaav-en!

  * * *

  "Well?" Mary Margaret Wildeblood prompted, a bit impatiently. She was naked on Williams's bed and had been Lourding herself, not vigorously, just gently, very gently, not getting too excited yet, merely trying to get him excited.

  "Just a minute just a minute," Williams said, sitting in his drawers on the side of the bed, one sock in his hand. It wasn't the transsex thing that was delaying him; he was still struggling with the New Idea she had given him back at the Three Lions. "It isn't just poisoning," he said absently. "Anything that shocks the whole neuroendocrine system might do it. Yes, of course. Artificially induced imprint vulnerability."

  Mary Margaret seized his hand and placed it firmly between her thighs. "Imprint that," she said coyly.

  "Yes, yes," he said, caressing her absently. "But just listen a minute. Orgasm does it um I think. No, just the first orgasm. Right? You keep repeating the pattern of the first orgasm…"

  "/ don't," Mary Margaret said. "Just up there a bit, on my Atkinson there, there, ah Christ."

  "Yes yes you don't and a lot of people I know don't," he said. "Yes. Um? But the people whose sexual patterns keep changing are a minority, certainly. They've changed their imprints somehow. Um. Yes, yes. Oh, my God!"

  "What is it?" Mary Margaret was becoming cross; his hand had stopped moving entirely.

  "Sorry," he said, resuming the gentle stimulation on her Atkinson and the outer lips of her Feinstein. "I just realized some people keep changing their ideas too. They've loosened the semantic imprints. My God, that's why conditioning theory is inadequate. Don't you see the conditioned reflexes are built onto the imprints…"

  "God God God oh sweet Jesus God"

  "It's a shock to the whole system. People who've had near-death or clinical death experiences. Shipwrecked sailors. And oh Jesus I call myself an anthropologist and I never got it before, rites of initiation of course that's what they're all about of course making new imprints…"

  "Oh God oh God darling darling"

  "Yes yes, I love you, new imprints of course, yes yes are you coming on my little darling"

  "God God GOD!!!"

  "Ah sweet little darling was it good? Ah yes you look so sweet now there's nothing as lovely as that post-Millett expression but about those imprint circuits-"

  "Shut up and Briggs me please darling"

  And so, still reflecting on shock and imprint vulnerability and the changing of sexual-semantic imprints, Blake Williams began Briggsing a person who had been masculine for almost all the years they had known each other, wondering just how queer this was, really.

  "Incidentally," Dr. Dashwood asked, "what do you think the Hammerklavier is all about?"

  Bertha Van Ation and he were sitting at the kitchen table now, sipping a little peach brandy he had found still remaining in the cabinet, and munching Ritz crackers.

  Dr. Van Ation brushed some auburn hairs back from her forehead. "The Black Hole," she said promptly.

  "Ah you mean he was feeling dragged down into something he couldn't escape?" Dr. Dashwood suddenly remembered he wanted to look up Jan (or was it Hans?) Zelenka.

  "No, not that aspect of it." Bertha munched and frowned thoughtfully. "The suspension of all the cosmological laws. The end of space. The end of time. The end of causality."

  Dashwood smiled. "Some people thought it was the end of music when it was first performed," he said. "You might be on the right track."

  "Why thank you sir said she." Bertha grinned. "You really think I'm dragging my own astronomy into the music department."

  "You have every right to," he said. "We all see and hear through our own filters. To me, the Hammerklavier sounds like an unsuccessful attempt at Tantric sex. And the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies sound like monumentally successful attempts. That's me dragging my own speciality into the music department."

  "You are a doll."

  "And you're a living doll."

  "Isn't sex great?"

  "If God invented anything better," Dashwood said, quoting an old proverb and adapting it to the Feminist age, "She kept it to Herself."

  "And how did I score on your scale?"

  "Ten Spelvins of Sincerity, Sixteen Lovelaces of Hedonism, and seven Havens of Tenderness. No, make that eight Havens. You went off the scale."

  In Hollywood, Carol Christmas, the Blond Goddess of everybody's fantasies, was sleeping alone for once.

  She was still involved in 250,000,000 sex acts every hour.

  The quantum perturbations pulsed gently through her atoms, stimulating her molecules, rejuvenating her cells, providing a very satisfactory Trip for her whole neuroen-docrine system, and enriching her dreams vastly.

  It was perfect Tantric sex, and she wasn't even consciously aware of it.

  This was happening to her, and had been happening to her since the release of Deep Mongolian Steinem Job, because she was the Blond Goddess in so many fantasies.

  All over the world, as she slept and even while she was awake in the daytime, the quantum inseparability principie (QUIP) stimulated her gently, because all over the world, every hour, 250,000,000 lonely men were Lourding themselves while looking at photographs of her.

  Back in New York, Polly Esther Doubleknit was wandering around her apartment stark-naked.

  Her lover of the evening was sound asleep in the bedroom, but Polly Esther was wakeful and thinking of twenty dozen things at once, like the Second Oswald in Hong Kong and whether fish ever get seasick and how splendidly heavenly it had felt when her lover's tongue was up inside her Feinstein and what was the name of the third Andrews Sister-Maxine and Laverne and who?-and Silent Tristero's Empire and why so many things come in threes, not just Maxine and Laverne and what's-her-name but Curly and Larry and Moe; and Tom, Dick, and Harry; and Noah's three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japhet; and
Groucho, Chico, and Harpo; and Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva; and Past, Present, and Future; and Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner; and the three witches in Macbeth; and the three brothers who start on the same quest in all the old fairy tales; and the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary; and of course the Big Three, Pops, J.C., and Smokey; and maybe she should cut down on those diet pills; it was absurd to be wandering around at three in the morning thinking in threes.

  And then there was up-down, back-forward, and right-left, the three dimensions in space; and Wynken, Blynken, and Nod; and the Three Wise Men, Whozit, and Whatzis-name and Melchior; and Peter, Jack, and Martin, the three brothers in Swift's Tale of a Tub; and Peter, Paul, and Mary; and the Kingston Trio; and Friends, Romans, Countrymen, which was not only a triad, but a progressive triad, one beat, two beats, three beats, one, two, three, just like that, and she would definitely cut down on the diet pills.

  Polly Esther finally put a record on the stereo, turning the volume down to low so as not to waken her lover in the bedroom.

  She picked the Hammerklavier sonata, not out of coincidence or propinquity or even synchronicity, but just because it was her favorite of Beethoven's piano pieces. It was her favorite because she couldn't understand it, no matter now often she played it. It was the musical equivalent of a Zen koan to her, endlessly fascinating because endlessly enigmatic.

  The stark, discordant opening bars drove all wandering threesomes out of her mind, narrowing her attention to Ludwig's urgent if incomprehensible universe of structured sound. She was swept into it again, as always, swept along by emotions so deep and yet so austere that nobody has ever been able to name them. Once she had invited the world's three most admired concert pianists to a party, just so she could ask each of them, privately, what they thought the Hammerklavier meant. As she expected, she had gotten three wildly conflicting answers. Another time she had ordered every book in print about Beethoven from Doubleday's on Fifty-third Street at Fifth Avenue and looked up Hammerklavier in the index of each. She got forty-four different opinions that way.