SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

by Robert Anton Wilson

  "My God," Dashwood said. "You really want to know the idea behind it all."

  "Yes," DeAct said. "Certainly. That's our problem in a nutshell."

  "I don't go along with any of this, DeAct," Knight said. "It's just a case of degeneracy and perversion, and who cares what rationalizations they have?"

  "That'll be enough, Tobias," DeAct repeated.

  "I always say," Knight went on, " 'Scratch a scientist and you'll find an atheist, and scratch an atheist and you'll find a goddamned Commie.' "

  "That will be enough, I said."

  Dashwood was thinking. This was the old Mutt-and-Jeff routine: the tough, dumb cop who terrified you, and the smart, sympathetic cop who encouraged you to explain yourself. Still…

  "Very well," he said. "I will attempt to explain Project Pan."

  "You can call your lawyer before talking to us," DeAct said hurriedly. "You can call a psychiatrist, too, if you want," he added.

  "I am a psychiatrist," Dashwood reminded him. Was DeAct worried about the Supreme Court and the international repercussions of putting sixty-eight top scientists on trial, or did he have some intuitive sense of the magnitude of what Project Pan was all about?

  "Can you take me seriously," Dashwood spoke directly to DeAct, "if I tell you that what we have discovered here is the summum bonum, the secret of secrets, the key to the mystic powers of the ancients, the medicine of metals, the stone of the wise, the lost art of the Rosicrucians… that what you have been trained to consider most despicable is the central sacrament of existence, the key to higher consciousness and intelligence, the evolutionary imperative, the greatest scientific breakthrough to our epoch? Of course I always knew I would go to jail for it. I regard myself as lucky to live in an age when you won't burn me at the stake."

  DeAct lit another cigarette, avoiding Dashwood's eyes. He mumbled, "You sound a bit grandiose, Doctor."

  "This guy's a schizo," Knight said, more bluntly.

  "Let me begin at the beginning," Dashwood said, ignoring Knight. "We are all primates. Do you understand that, gentlemen?"

  "Sure," DeAct said. "Evolution. I had that in college."

  "It's just a theory," Knight grumbled. "A man still has the right to believe in God in this country, you know."

  Knight was rather overdoing the tough-cop routine, Dashwood thought.

  "It's a biochemical fact," Dashwood said, "that ninety-eight percent of our DNA is identical with chimpanzee DNA. Eighty-five percent of our DNA is identical with that of the South American spider monkey, our most distant relative in the primate family. That means, gentlemen, that most of our behavior is genetically programmed to follow the same survival, status, and sex programs as the other primates. We are only two percent different from the chimpanzee, and only fifteen percent different from the spider monkey. Think of that the next time you go to the zoo. Our cousins are looking out at us through the bars.

  "Now let me emphasize this, gentlemen. We suffer from certain induced cultural hallucinations. Every tribe brainwashes its children into the island-reality of the adults of the tribe; that's the great discovery of Einstein in her principle of neurological relativism.

  "In our tribe-Western Christian civilization, as it's called-we have brainwashed ourselves into not seeing and not thinking about our relationship to the other primates and to life in general. We know we are primates if we have gotten as far as college"-he emphasized the last for Knight-"but we keep forgetting it, ignoring it, losing track of it."

  "Bullburger," Knight growled. It was a typical primate reaction in a threat situation, Dashwood thought. "Go on," DeAct said nervously, lighting a third cigarette. "If I were to write a novel of about six hundred pages," Dashwood said, "and mentioned on every one of the first four hundred pages that all of us are primates, we would find it funny or satirical. Even stranger, if I stopped mentioning it for about two hundred pages, the readers would all forget it quickly, and be startled if I mentioned it again on page five hundred fifteen. It's a fact that all educated persons know, but most of us would rather forget or simply not think about.

  "Now, what is Bestiality, gentlemen?" Dashwood didn't pause, but answered his own question. "Sexual relations between a human and an animal. But humans are animals, as we keep forgetting, so that definition is culturally biased and self-serving. Bestiality is sex between animals, that's all. Interspecies sex. And any biologist will tell you that is quite common. Insects will Potter Stewart any bug that comes along if they can't find their own species. The ubiquity of the mule, gentlemen, shows how common is the occurrence of interspecies sex-bestiality as our law calls it-between horses and donkeys. Throughout the reptile, bird, and fish kingdoms, the same behavior is commonplace.

  "There is no species on the planet, gentlemen, that thinks it is 'degrading' to have sex with another species- except ourselves. And that is because we are trying to forget that we are primates."

  Dashwood paused.

  "This is some kind of put-on," Tobias Knight said irritably. "Get to the point, Dashwood."

  But DeAct was crushing out his cigarette with a thoughtfill frown. "So that's your defense, then?" he asked. "Scientific inquiry and so on… You just wanted to find out the ah subjective similarities and differences in comparing Bestiality with ordinary sex and homosexuality and ah the other variations?"

  "Defense!" Dashwood exclaimed. "I am not defending myself. Whether defense is necessary at all remains to be seen. Right now, I am merely filling you in on the background as you requested." He paused.

  "All progress is made by violating taboos," he went on presently. "A certain friend of mine ah made that observation many years ago."

  "Blake Williams," Tobias Knight said. "We know he's in this up to his ears."

  "A certain friend," Dashwood went on, neither confirming nor denying. "He pointed out that without heretics and blasphemers-without rebels, that is-we would all still be living like Homo Erectus half a million years ago. All progress has been made by individuals who dared to think about the unthinkable and do the forbidden. As Oscar Wilde said, 'Disobedience was man's Original Virtue.' Those who dare-"

  "Wilde was a Bryanting degenerate," Knight growled. He was showing more of his canine teeth now: the signal of primate anger.

  "Those who dare cross the line-any line-are explorers, and explorers sometimes get lost," Dashwood went on. "But without them, we never would have walked out of the tribal stage into the urban or out of the Dark Ages into the Renaissance.

  "But enough rhetoric. Let me come to the point.

  "Gentlemen, dozens of anthropologists have sat in this office and told me stories that once made my hair stand on end. And dozens, and scores, of parapsychologists have told me even wilder tales. Gentlemen, everybody outside Bad Ass or Seattle knows that the line between Experimental Music and Noise is very hard to find, that the line between avant-garde literature and nonsense is ambiguous, that even the line between the Beautiful and the Hideous is far from fixed, since a Ubangi woman with a plate in her lip is attractive to a Ubangi man, but absurd or repulsive to most of us. Mathematicians know that what constitutes proof is still not itself totally understood. Scientific Truth, so called, used to remain the same for millennia; then it began changing every century; in this century, it has changed every decade, or even quicker in some fields. And yet, in spite of all this, we think there is a firm, fixed, immutable boundary between the Real and the Unreal.

  "Gentlemen, there is no such boundary.

  "Everything that we regard as filthy, obscene, blasphemous, and disgusting is part of the ancient mind-science called Magick."

  Dashwood smiled gently. "Sex with a menstruating woman is forbidden, and considered 'indecent' or appalling, because it was once part of the sacraments of the Moon Goddess cult. The menstruating woman was thought to be possessed by the Goddess, I suppose, but the theory doesn't matter. Judeo-Christian civilization put the practice under a ban, and made it 'evil,' because it was part of the ancient Goddess religion that the
worshipers of a Male God could not tolerate.

  "Homosexuality is forbidden and considered revolting and ugly because it was part of the tradition of shamanism in most parts of the world not included in the Judeo-Christian cult.

  "And yet, what do we find within the Judeo-Christian world itself? What do we find in the most orthodox times? We find secret cults using these forbidden acts for occult purposes. Sex with a menstruating woman was called 'the mystery of the Red Gold' by the alchemists, and was part of the process of consciousness expansion in that form of Magick. Homosexuality was part of the secret teachings of the Knights Templar and many other Magick cults."

  "There are perverts everywhere," Knight said. "That doesn't prove anything."

  Dashwood smiled again. "Tell me," he asked, "how do you feel after a good Potter Stewart?"

  "What does that prove?" Knight demanded.

  "Let us see where it leads us," Dashwood said. "You feel good, do you not? Yes, you will agree to that much. How would you feel after Potter Stewarting for four hours?"

  "Tired."

  "Not if you were trained in Tantra," Dashwood said. "Tantrists have been known to continue the sexual act for far longer-eight hours, even. Is it not strange that Shakespeare referred to it as 'the monetary trick,' and Kinsey found, back in the forties, that the average Unistat male reaches Millett in less than two minutes? Is this not part of the Taboo I am discussing, the Taboo on the Magick secrets of non-Judeo-Christian religion? We have loosened up a lot since Kinsey's day, but to a Tantrist we are still rushing and missing the little details, you might say. Why is that?"

  DeAct lit another cigarette. "Jesus," he said, "are you telling us that every kind of sex that's forbidden in the Bible is the key to some kind of occult knowledge or power? Is that it?"

  "A long time ago, when I wasn't ready to understand yet," Dashwood said, "a parapsychologist told me, 'Scratch a trance medium and you'll find a homosexual.' That's not one hundred percent true, but it's true more often than not.

  "The Moon Goddess is a metaphor, let us say. But what happens to a woman in her menses, the power that is present and can be used in mind science, is no metaphor. "Now, what started Project Pan was something I discovered, by 'accident' as they say, just browsing in a book that didn't seem to relate to my own work at all, a book on Egypt, and there it was: there was a priestess who performed fellatio on a goat every year on the Egyptian New Year's Day, which is our July 23. Yes, gentlemen-in the vernacular, she gave the goat a Steinem Job."

  "There are perverts everywhere," Knight repeated. "This was central to the Egyptian religion," Dashwood said. "Was the whole religion a perversion? Don't you see, everything called perversion got that name because it was part of the old Magick tradition?

  "And guess what, gentlemen: What is the most common subject in the cave paintings left by our ancestors thirty thousand years ago?

  "Bestiality. Yes, gentlemen-our ancestors portrayed themselves, over and over, having sex with goats and bisons and every animal they knew about." "I don't believe it," Knight said flatly. "Look it up sometime," Dashwood said pleasantly. "It's mentioned in Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, by Wes-ton LeBarre, one of our most respected anthropologists. You never see those paintings in any popular books of cave art, but every paleoanthropologist knows about them. "You find the same in ancient Indian art, ancient Babylonian art, ancient art everywhere.

  "And you find the Magick secret coded into myth and legend over and over. The formula for producing a Man-God or Super-Hero is the mating of human and animal. Europa and the bull; Leda and the swan; Beauty and the Beast; the Buddha fathered by a white elephant in some versions of the legend.

  "Tantric sex is the portal of the mysteries, and the alchemists called it the secret of silver. This is the secret of gold, gentlemen. And it's even coded into the Judeo-Christian mythos-after the Gnostics got through editing the manuscripts. Why do you think Eve and the Serpent are credited with giving us the knowledge of good and evil? Why does the Hebrew word for 'serpent,' neschek, have the same Cabalistic value as the word 'Messiah'? Why is the Messiah born of the union of a woman with a bird? Can't you read the message in the formula, animal-human-super-human?"

  "This is blasphemous and disgusting, as well as criminal," Knight said. "You, Dr. Dashwood, are as crazy as a loon."

  "Why do you feel 'good' during and after sex?" Dashwood went on. "Just nature's way of tricking us into reproducing the species? Yes, that is part of it. But nature loves to economize, to do several things at once. You feel high and powerful because you are raising your mental energy- the Kundalini of the Hindu metaphor. With the proper ritual and proper training, the energy can be raised to the point where your Will and Imagination are illuminated with power and you can create a new Reality. Literally. You walk over the line between the state marked 'real* as far as you dare to go into the 'unreal,' and you make your new line. Until you have the courage to try again and go even farther out…"

  "Crazy as a loon," Knight repeated. DeAct put out his cigarette and lit another. "I want to thank you, Dr. Dashwood," he said formally, "for being so open with us and ah taking us into your confidence so fully. You will understand, of course, that we cannot ah buy your argument at ah first glance. It is startling and ah very unorthodox and ah that is, well, I'm sure the jury will understand, a brilliant mind and probably the factor of overwork and too much imagination."

  Dashwood stood up. "I see," he said. "Well, it's time I tried it-the one experiment I was always afraid of."

  "Grab him, Tobias!" DeAct shouted.

  But he was too late.

  Dashwood opened his mouth to its maximum extension, breathed in deeply, and then bellowed:

  AAAOOOOZORAZZ AZZAIEOAZAEIIIOZ AKHOEOOOYTHO EAZAEAOOZAKHO ZAKHEYTHXAALET

  HYKH

  "Gesundheit," Knight said automatically.

  But Dashwood was gone from that universe.

  The sign said:

  CHAPEL PERILOUS

  PRICE OF ADMISSION: YOUR MIND

  S. MUSS SINE, PROPRIETOR

  Dashwood passed through the lavatory into the laboratory, where Patrick Knowles and Lon Chancy were turning switches and throwing relays wildly as Bela Lugosi, with Karloff's old makeup, tried to pretend he was the Frankenstein monster, while Ilona Masey huddled in a corner, looking worried.

  It seemed that some refurbishing and rebuilding had been going on in the downtown area, for Union Square was much bigger than Dashwood remembered and there were several new buildings surrounding it, most of them built in hyperbolic and non-Euclidean curves. Chinatown was now facing directly onto the Square instead of being two blocks downhill and to the right, but there was a huge sign on the Chinatown Gate, saying:

  CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS

  FU MANCHU, PROPRIETOR

  Claude Shannon of Bell Laboratories and Tristan Tzara, the pioneer Dadaist, were picking random words out of people's mouths as they passed and gluing them to a huge billboard where they had already formed the pseudosentence:

  AMERICAN LIFE BOMB WENT AUTHORITARIAN

  IN FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH AUTHOR

  "We're discovering the information/redundance ratio in random signals," Shannon explained, waving a program-able calculator.

  "We're creating a new Art Form!" Tzara shouted.

  The Tin Woodman of Oz went by, with some of the boys from the Heavy Metal Mob.

  There were only two doors leading back out to the Bureau of Common Sense. One had a picture of Christ on the cross and bore the legend LOVE ONE ANOTHER; but the other had a picture of Captain Ahab and bore the legend I'D STRIKE THE SUN IF IT INSULTED ME.

  "Do I have to make a choice?" Babbitt asked. All this was going by too fast for him-one minute he was driving home from work and passed the billboard on Howard Street with the eye-on-the-pyramid, and the next minute he was in this place.

  The lights began to go out all over San Francisco, first in ones and twos, then in dozens and scores, and then in hundreds, until a stygian b
lackness descended in which Punk Rock groups and transvestites could be seen dimly as they marched in robot hordes toward the Bay.

  "UFOs over the power stations!" somebody shouted. "A major blackout!"

  And behind the Gate of Chinatown the drums of Fu Manchu began.

  The Punk Rock groups led the parade downhill, through Chinatown, to the Ocean.

  "Turn back, turn back!" screamed an effete intellectual snob. "The sea is NOT our home! Beware of the rising rivers of blood, beware of the Robot Animal Within. Turn back, turn back!"

  But the Punkers marched, and everybody fell in step behind them. First came the Ludes and the Creepers, then the Dirks and the Blunt Instruments, then more and more: the Problem of Anxiety, the Daggers, the Funny Farm, the Noon's Repose, and the Troubled Midnight. And now it was not separate trickles, but one huge rushing stream: the Leapers, the Laughing Academy, the Foamix Culprits, the Mail Cover, Dr. Terror's House of 111 Repute, the Keyhole Peepers, the Wire Tappers, the Whoopee Casket Company. And over the shrieks and howls of their music, from deep inside the hidden recesses of Chinatown, the drums of Fu Manchu grew louder. And more and more were coming, still: Dashwood recognized the Muggers, the Synthesizers, Moses and Monotheism, Reefer Madness, Crazy Artie's Crisis Intervention Center, the Junior College of Cardinals, Totem and Taboo, the Things on the Doorstep, the Hoods, the Lanovacs, Six Flags over the Vatican, the Sleepers, the Beepers, the Roofers, the Cokers, the Thundering Hoofs, the Framis Stand, the Power to Cloud Men's Minds, and the Croakers.