Read Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy Online
Authors: Robert A. Wilson
“I know all
about
your
plansss,”
Marvin Gardens was snarling at Jo Malik, in his coked-up Peter Lorre voice. “I know why you picked Hemingway to discredit and
defame.
I know what you and your
extraterrestrial friends
are planning to do to humanity, you cold-blooded
fiendsss.”
“You know,” Jo said, suddenly tired of her own anger, “you really ought to lay off that coke, buster.”
“Yess,
yess
, claim that I’m paranoid, that’s the
usual tactic—”
“I say you two,” Epicene Wildeblood drawled, “did either of you see Cagliostro?”
“The magician?” Jo asked.
“Well,” Wildeblood asked with infinite patience, “is there another Cagliostro?”
Marvin and Jo exchanged equally puzzled glances.
“I guess he hasn’t arrived yet,” Jo offered finally.
“What?” Wildeblood frowned. “Why, he’s been here all night.”
Marvin and Jo exchanged glances again.
“I guess we missed him,” Marvin said gently, with the ghastly smile of one who humors a deranged mind.
Wildeblood glared at him and stalked off.
That was really heavy hash, Jo decided. Wildeblood had been hallucinating a guest who wasn’t even there.
Knee-jerk liberals and all the certified saints of sanctified humanism are quick to condemn this great and much-maligned Transylvanian statesman.
—W
ILLIAM
F
.
BUCKLEY
, J
R
.,
The Wit and Wisdom of Vlad the Impaler
The Warren Belch Society held its annual meeting on January 2, 1984, while POE was busy mining downtown Washington with homemade atom bombs. The Society knew nothing of this and was more concerned with disappearing gorillas in Chicago.
Their tiny office was dominated by a huge oil painting of Schrödinger’s Cat, executed in weird orgone-blue hues by their founder and presiding officer, the eccentric millionaire, W. Clement Cotex. All active members of the Society—eight of them, to be exact—were present.
The Warren Belch Society had been founded after Cotex had been kicked out of the Fortean Society for having bizarre notions. The purpose of “the Belchers” (as Cotex jovially called them) was to investigate those aspects of scientific theory and those alleged occult events which were regarded as “too far out” by the unimaginative Forteans, who are willing to investigate UFOs, rains of crabs and fish, girls who might have turned into swans,
and similar matters, but, like their founder, the late Charles Fort, drew the line at the dogs that said “Good morning” and then vanished in a puff of green smoke.
Cotex, admittedly, was an intellectual surrealist. The name of the Society, for instance, was deliberately taken from the most obscure of all the lawmen of the Old West, Marshall Warren Belch of Dodge City, who had unfortunately been shot to death when his pistol jammed during his very first gunfight. It was Clem Cotex’s claim that the Everett-Wheeler-Graham-DeWitt interpretation of the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox was literally true.
Everything that could happen did happen
. There were infinitely many universes, each one the result of a collapse of the state vector in a possible way. Thus, somewhere in superspace, there must be a universe in which Marshall Belch’s pistol didn’t jam and he lived on to become famous. There were probably TV shows and movies about him by now, over there in that universe. Or so Cotex argued.
In general, as good empiricists, the Belch Society was more interested in odd facts than in odd theories. A UFO Contactee who could jam zippers by looking at them. A man found dead in St. Louis with his throat torn as though by the fangs of an enormous beast, with no animal missing from the local zoos (the famous Stimson Case of 1968). Documented instances of a fat bearded man with jolly eyes seen near chimneys on Christmas Eve, with a bag of toys over his shoulder. Bleeding Catholic statues. Flying Hindus. Dematerializing Buddhists. Kahuna fire-walkers. Why the signs always say WALK when the streetlight is on red and DON’T WALK when it is on green. Books in which the permutations of the phrase “heaven and hell” appeared at random intervals, forming a Markoff Chain.
“Take anybody in the world—anybody in this novel,” Cotex once explained his theory to a group of skeptical fellow characters. “Like you, Dr. Williams,” he added,
picking out the most erudite and wiggy in the crowd, Blake Williams. “In one of the parallel universes, you’re probably not an anthropologist, but maybe a chemist or something. In another universe, you might even be a female musician instead of a male scientist. And so on. In another universe,” Cotex concluded, “J might be a small businessman from Little Rock who believes the universe is five-cornered.”
The disappearing gorillas, they were all convinced, were: (a) a major breakthrough to another universe; (b) not yet known to those stuffy old Forteans; and (c) really hot stuff.
“If gorillas can teleport,” Professor Fred “Fidgets” Digits was saying, “that may be the whole key to the Mad Fishmonger.”
“We needn’t assume that the gorillas actually teleport,” Dr. Horace Naismith objected. “It may be that there is a Schwartzchild Radius in Lincoln Park Zoo and they sort of fall into it and pass the Event Horizon.”
This led to some lively debate on whether teleportation was or was not more likely than a Black Hole in the Lincoln Park Zoo, but Blake Williams suddenly derailed the conversation with a thoughtful and uncompleted “I wonder if this goes all the way back to the Democratic Convention of 1968….”
“Say,” Cortex cried, eyes wide. “What was all that fighting and fussing about, anyway? The way I remember it, the radicals wanted to sleep in the park and the police beat the shit out of them and chased them out of the park. That seems an awfully silly issue to lead to a whole week of rioting and tear-gassing. And why were so many journalists—
and especially cameramen
—attacked by the cops …?”
“You think maybe the city authorities knew about it, even back then …?” Naismith asked eagerly.
“People may resist new ideas, as we all know to our
sorrow,” Williams said, “but a fact this size—
over two hundred
gorillas purchased by the zoo over a ten-year period and
only two
accounted for—must have been noticed by somebody on the finance committee at least. You can bet your sweet ass the city authorities know about it. And, of course, they’re imposing a cover-up, just like the air force with the UFOs. The same old government reflex. Pavlov’s Dog meets Schrödinger’s Cat again.”
“This is a time for action, not theory,” said Cotex. “Gentlemen, I am flying to Chicago tonight to begin a personal investigation. A case like this is a surrealist’s heaven and a logician’s hell,” he added with a chuckle. He was totally nonlinear.
There is no such thing as water. It is merely melted ice.
—F
URBISH
L
OUSEWART
V
,
Unsafe Wherever You Go
The Mad Fishmonger was the patron saint of the Warren Belch Society. He, or she, had originally appeared, or had been alleged to have appeared, in Cromer Gardens, Worcester, England, on May 28, 1881. He, or she, along with perhaps a dozen assistants, had rushed through Cromer Gardens at high noon, throwing crabs and periwinkles all over the streets. They also threw crabs and periwinkles into the fields beside the road. They climbed high walls to
dump some of the fish into gardens and onto the roofs of houses.
It was thorough, painstaking work, and since the Mad Fishmonger and his, or her, associates accomplished it all at noon on a busy day
without being seen
, the citizens of Cromer Gardens claimed that the crabs and periwinkles had fallen out of the sky.
This notion was not acceptable to the scientists of the day, who held it as axiomatic that crabs and periwinkles do not fall out of the sky. A scientist from
Nature
magazine therefore offered the Mad Fishmonger an explanation, although he failed to explain how the Fishmonger and his co-conspirators had accomplished their feat without being noticed by any of the citizenry.
Charles Fort, founder of the Fortean Society, rejected the Mad Fishmonger indignantly and claimed that crabs and periwinkles
did
fall from the sky. After Clem Cotex was thrown out of the Fortean Society for his heresies, he reconsidered the whole puzzling case of the mysterious event in Cromer Gardens on May 28, 1881. Cotex decided to believe in the Mad Fishmonger. It was the fundamental hypothesis of his system of philosophy, and the guiding light of the Warren Belch Society, that the craziest-sounding theory is the most likely one. All things considered, the motives and methodology of the Mad Fishmonger were much more mysterious than shellfish falling from the sky;
ergo
, the Mad Fishmonger probably did exist.
Among the things the science of that time could not explain, which Clem Cotex attributed to the Mad Fishmonger, were other Damned Things that fell out of the sky, such as iron balls with inscriptions on them or chunks of ice as big as elephants. There were also Damned Things on the ground, including jumping furniture, “haunts,” and the Gentry. There were animals that shouldn’t be and
animals that couldn’t be and trans-time and trans-space perceptions and religious “miracles.”
The first clue to correct understanding of these things came when quantum causality was finally formulated correctly in Gilhooley’s Demonstration of 1994, and nobody understood Gilhooley.
At the time of our story everybody was as confused as Clem Cotex. Most of them just expressed their confusion, or rather concealed it, in more conservative ways.
The spirit of decision consists simply in not hesitating when an inner voice commands you to act.
—F
URBISH
L
OUSEWART V
,
Unsafe Wherever Your Go
Just before coming to Wildeblood’s party, Blake Williams wrote one of the most heretical passages in his jealously guarded
Secret Diaries.
He wrote:
I am an anthropologist,
ergo
a professional liar. An anthropologist is a scientist trained to observe that every society is a little bit mad, including his own. He holds his job by never mentioning this fact explicitly.
Perhaps 1983 as a whole had been too much for him. In January one of the biggest breakthroughs had occurred
at Project Pan, and Williams and Dashwood had to reach new heights of eloquence to persuade the other scientists involved that any premature disclosure could be lethal. At that very time, they pointed out, the John Birch Society was staging massive sit-ins and protests against the introduction of anthropology texts to high schools in Orange County.
In February the Government Accounting Office announced that all the gold in Fort Knox had disappeared sometime in the past decade.
In March three new life-extension pills were placed on the market during the controversy over FOREVER, the first life-extension pill, which was widely suspected of creating disastrous side effects. All the data on FOREVER thus far had shown one consistency: scientists not employed by Blue Sky Inc., the manufacturer of FOREVER, continually found evidence of these tragic side effects, and all scientists employed by Blue Sky continually found no evidence of such problems. (That month Blake Williams wrote in his
Diaries
, quoting Lord Macaulay, “The law of gravity would be thrown into dispute were there a commercial interest involved.”)
In April average rent for a one-room apartment reached $1,500 per month and many families were renting broom closets at $600 to $700 per month or just sleeping in parks. Landlords were hanged in Berkeley, California, and Carbondale, Michigan.
*
In May the missing gold from Fort Knox was found buried at San Clemente. Nixon still denied
everything.
The new
World Almanac
listed the first UFO cult to reach 20,000,000 members among the major world religions.
In June the first human embryo transplant was accomplished and the U.S. troops in Tierra del Fuego mutinied.
In July FEMFREE, a drug which allegedly removed mothering impulses, was banned by the FDA, and UFO cultists and Christians clashed in Belfast.
In August astronomer Bertha Van Ation discovered two new planets in the solar system, and bootleg FEMFREE at ten times the free market price began to circulate through Women’s Lib groups coast to coast.
In September UFO cultists and Moslems clashed in Cairo.
In October landlords were lynched in three more American cities, the first human brain transplant was accomplished, and UFO cultists clashed with Maoists in Peking.
In November, Mae Brussell on KPFA-Berkeley charged that Jesus had been killed by a CIA plot.
*
Galactic Archives:
Rent was a form of tribute paid by non-“owning” users of land to nonusing “owners.” The “owners,” known as
lords-of-the-land
, or
landlords
for short, were originally relatives of the alpha male or king (see Nomis of Noom, “From the Baboon Food-Gathering Band to Consciousness”), but among the higher barbarians, such as in Unistat at the time of this epic, anyone with enough “money” could buy land and become a “landlord.”
Every society encourages some behaviors and punitively forbids others. Thus, although cultures were not scientifically designed, they act much like computers programmed for specific results. One can look at their cultural structure and predict: this one
will have a high murder rate, this one will have many schizophrenics, this one will remain Stone Age unless interfered with, this one is going to the stars.
—M
ARILYN
C
HAMBERS
,
Neuro-Anthropology
Benny “Eggs” Benedict never got home from Epicene Wildeblood’s party that night. On the corner of Lexington and Twenty-third, Benny was hit by a heavy lead pipe, which smashed his skull and killed him. The pipe did not fall by accident; it was wielded deliberately by a man named Francesco “Pablo” Gomez. Pablo did not hate Benny or have any personal feelings toward him at all and he did not grin sadistically. Pablo hit Benny with the pipe because Benny was well dressed and probably had money in his pockets. When Benny was comatose but not yet dead, Pablo dragged him into an alley and went through his pockets, finding to his delight that his surmise had been correct and Benny was actually carrying more than $50; he had $52, to be exact. Benny died while Pablo was rifling the wallet.