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 Marion 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 Marion 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… Marion… 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 "Marion 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 often 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 light
ning, and how, out of the union of the 0 and 1, all of the numbers of creation could be generated in binary notation.
And as everybody meditated on the miraculous return of the Shivalingam, old Ringh remembered how General Crowley promised, when he had to return to the West, that he would use what he had learned in India to teach the whole world how the phallic spark of Imagination, represented by the 1 or lingam, generated everything out of absolute 0, the dark yoni, nothingness.
PART ONE
FLOSSING
Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
-roman polanski
OCCULT TECHNOLOGY
Let me control a planet's oxygen supply and I don't care who makes the laws.
–great cthulhus starry wisdom band
When Clem Cotex decided to program himself into the head space of the First Bank of Religiosophy, he sent five dollars to Bad Ass, Texas, for Dr. Horace Naismith's cassette tape, "The Occult Technology of Money and the Moneylords." By the time the tape arrived in the mail, Clem had been through so many etgenstates, both as male and female, that he no longer wondered about "the stuff in the tomato juice" and was merely moderately surprised occasionally that most people were not as flexible in their thinking as he was. In fact, Clem had been a Scientologist, a solipsist, and a Logical Positivist, among other things, in the interim.
Filling a pipe with Alamout Black, the hashish of the Assassins, Clem lit up, toked deeply, and began playing the tape of "The Occult Technology of Money and the Moneylords."
"The Federal Reserve System-a private bank responsible to nobody, despite its name-creates money out of nothing," Naismith began in a pleasant Texas twang. Clem toked again and began to grok Naismith in his fullness.
The tape played on and Clem toked again each time he felt the need to grok more deeply.
Naismith quoted Buckminster Fuller (the only Unistat President ever to resign from office) and Ezra Pound, the folk singer, and John Adams and Tom Edison and a lot of other people who had long ago been on Clem's list of folks who had probably been given some of the "stuff" in the tomato juice. All of these men, Naismith pointed out, had proposed money systems more efficient and more just than the present Federal Reserve System.
"There is no one money system that was ordained by God," Naismith said. "They were all invented by human beings and can be improved by human beings.
"Now, what is money?" Naismith asked. "Money is information. Ask any computer programmer about that, if you don't believe it. Money is a signal, a unit of pure information. It is as abstract as mathematics. Cattle served as money once. So did leather. So did the precious metals. They were commodity monies, because they were worth something in themselves. Modern paper money is pure information, worth absolutely zilch, except for the signals printed on it." Clem really began to get Naismith's perspective. He toked again, feeling the Big Idea behind the First Bank of Religiosophy.
"Money in the modern world," Naismith went on, "is no more than a promise to pay. If you look at the bills in your wallet right now, you'll see what they're promising to pay. They're promising to pay you more paper. They don't have to give you a gram of gold or silver or any real commodity. They'll give you more paper if you want to trade in the paper you already have. Didn't that ever strike you as a little bit funny?
"Think of it this way," Naismith said, warming to his subject. "This is a corny old Sufi parable, but it might help you to get the picture."
The great Sufi sage Nasrudin, Naismith said, once invented a magic wand. Wishing to patent such a valuable device, Nasrudin waved the wand and created a patent office, which immediately appeared in 3-D Technicolor.
Nasrudin then walked in and told the clerk, "I want to patent a magic wand."
"You can't do that," said the clerk. "There is no such thing as a magic wand."
Nasrudin immediately waved his wand again, and the patent office and the clerk both disappeared.
"Jesus and Ludwig Christ!" Clem Cotex cried. He jumped up and turned off the tapes, totally At One with the doctrine of Religiosophy. "Money is information," he muttered, beginning to pace the room, stoned out of his gourd. "Holy snakes and ladders. 'Humanity is the symbol-using class of life, and those who control symbols control us.' I read that in Korzybski aeons ago. Information!"
Clem sat down at his desk and spread out a large piece of paper. He drew an elaborate scroll around it and printed at the top, "COTEX RESERVE SYSTEM." He made it a cashier's check to the Treasury of Unistat for ten million dollars, to be repaid at the prime interest rate of 15 percent. He then decorated another piece of paper, making it a Unistat National Bond, payable to the Cotex Reserve System for ten million dollars, thereby giving CRS the credit to loan ten million to Unistat.
He then switched the pieces of paper around on the desk. Cotex Reserve seemed to be ten million dollars ahead, and yet Unistat owed them ten million plus 15 percent interest per year.
("You can't do that. There is no such thing as a magic wand.")
Clem laughed hysterically. He remembered Simon Moon trying to explain Spencer Brown's Laws of Form to him: "To cross again is not to cross." Inflation, deflation, recession, depression: they were all like Nasrudin's patent office.
Clem knew he was in the state where synchronicities occur, so he went to his bookcase, picked a volume at random, and stuck his finger in, looking for the Message that would turn the whole experience into a full-scale Satori.
He was in The Nature of the Physical World by Sir Arthur Eddington, and the sentence he had found was:
We have certain preconceived ideas about location in space which have come down to us from apelike ancestors.
Clem Cotex laughed for nearly fifteen minutes. The next time he met Blake Williams, he unleashed his Illumination in an aphorism that he was convinced would, for once, startle the seemingly unflappable anthropologist.
"Money is the Schrodinger's Cat of economics," Clem said, waiting for some sensational reaction.
"Oh," Williams said quietly, "you've noticed that too?"
Dr. Horace Naismith had founded the First Bank of Religiosophy in Bad Ass, Texas, because he wanted to be sure nobody in the Establishment would take it seriously.
It was his plan to undermine the Federal Reserve System without their noticing what was happening.
Everything in Bad Ass was considered too absurd and repugnant for serious consideration. Bad Ass Township and the whole of Bad Ass County were a source of national embarrassment.
Bad Ass had been founded by descendants of the famous Jukes and Kallikak families, carriers of virulent idiocy genes, together with a few Snopeses who had been driven out of Mississippi for unnatural acts.
The Bad Ass School Board banned not only Evolution and Sex Education, but non-Euclidean geometry, the metric system, cultural anthropology, and all history texts written outside Texas.
Despite the President, the Supreme Court, Congress, the TV networks and Jack Anderson, the Bad Ass County Line still bore the traditional sign: DON'T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU IN BAD ASS, NIGGER. All roads leading to Bad Ass Township were littered with the decomposing bodies of murdered civil rights workers.
Everybody in Unistat was profoundly ashamed of Bad Ass and wished it were part of some other country. They never realized that, to the rest of the world, Unistat looked like Bad Ass County.
President Fuller, the man whose money ideas had inspired Dr. Naismith, was the only President in the history of Unistat to resign from office.
He had resigned only three months after taking office, and he did it on the radio. "I simply can't find any way to do anything socially useful here," he said with that innocent sincerity that had charmed the voters into electing him. "I listened to some well-meaning friends and ran for this office," Fuller went on, "and I now realize I was a perfect damned fool. The synergetic interlock or real time vectors in Universe cannot be augmented from here."
The people-and, even more, the other politicians-were outraged. They called Fuller a mugwump and wanted to pun
ish him. Unfortunately, the only way to punish a politician is to refuse to vote for him, and Fuller was no longer a politician and refused to run for any office, so they had to be satisfied with just calling him a nut.
That was in the 1930s, and everybody forgot about Fuller until the 1960s, when it turned out that his hobby- odd geometries-had a lot of practical applications.
But still nobody took Fuller's money theories seriously, except Dr. Naismith, and Eve Hubbard, who had run for President in 1980 on the Libertarian Immortalist ticket ("An End to Death and Taxes!").
There was another President of Unistat who resigned, actually, but he "only" (as they say) existed in a novel. This was a science-fiction thriller set in a parallel universe and was called Wigner's Friend. It was about the worst possible President the author, a Harvard professor named Leary, could imagine.
The President in Leary's book, called Noxin, was a monster. He got the country into totally unnecessary wars without the consent, and sometimes even without the knowledge, of Congress. He lied all the time, compulsively, even when it wasn't necessary. He put wiretaps on everybody-even on himself. (Leary, a psychologist, claimed this bizarre fantasy, which smacked of satire, was possible, for a certain type of paranoid mind.) He used the FBI and the IRS to harass every citizen who resisted this tyranny. He not only took bribes, but even had a team of enforcers who extorted "campaign" money from corporations under threat of turning the IRS on them. His political enemies all died in a series of strange assassinations that couldn't be explained. When Congress started investigating his crimes, he betrayed his own co-conspirators one by one.
Noxin even misappropriated government money to fix up his house, and cheated on his income tax.
The book was a runaway best-seller, because it had a taut, suspenseful plot and because Unistaters could congratulate themselves on not being dumb enough to ever elect such a President.
Naismith, despite his Texas accent, was no imbecile; he had his finger on part of what was really going on.
SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY Page 38