Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (54 page)

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.”

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?”

“I think,” Percy “Prime” Time said, “that we were discussing
Deep Mongolian Steinem Job
and that got us into the subject of unusual combinations and permutations.”

“Yes, yes, by God!” Williams exclaimed. “We realized that genius consists of looking for unusual combinations. Alekhine checkmates with a pawn, while his opponent is worrying about his queen. Beethoven proceeds from the third movement to the fourth without the usual break….”

“And Shakespeare makes a powerful iambic pentameter line, one of his most tragic, out of the same word repeated five times,” Simon interjected.

“And Picasso constructs a bull’s head, and a mighty sinister one,” Father Starhawk said, “from the handlebars and seat of a bicycle.”

“And so,” Simon Moon cried triumphantly, “the unusual combination is the key to creative genius, and Tzara did find a mechanical analog to it in picking words from a hat at random. And Shannon formulated it mathematically when he realized that information is nothing but unexpected combinations—negative entropy in thermodynamics!”

“Jesus, run that by me again,” Prime Time said faintly.

But Blake Williams had the ideational ball and was running with it. “So Dada Art and cybernetics are both ways of playing games with thermodynamics, with the laws of probability,” he said. “By God, I’m becoming a mystic. The only way the universe or universes can survive is by continuous acts of creativity—unusual combinations—on some level or another. Schrödinger was right all along: life feeds on negative entropy. The mind feeds on negative entropy. The best favor you can do for anybody is to shock them, and no wonder the Zen Masters hit you with a stick when you least expect it; by God, any shock that’s severe enough is a new imprint….”

“Imprint?” Professor Fred “Fidgets” Digits asked wanly.

“A hard-wired circuit in the nervous system,” Williams said. “Imprints are created by shock. The birth process itself is the first shock and makes the first imprint. Haven’t you ever read ethology?”

“You mean like a gosling imprints its mother, and if the mother isn’t right there it imprints some other white, round object like a Ping-Pong ball?” Digits said. “Yeah, I read that in Konrad Lorenz. Didn’t he win the Nobel for it?”

“Well,” Williams said, “I’ve been wondering for years about the Hollandaise Sauce mystery—the people who were poisoned by contaminated Hollandaise once and then had a toxic reaction whenever they tried to eat Hollandaise. That’s an imprint, I decided. Being poisoned is uh you must admit a shock.”

“Oh, wow,” Simon Moon said. “That’s like Dashiell Hammett’s story about the guy who almost got killed by a falling girder. All his imprints got extinguished. He just wandered off, forgetting is wife, his family, his job, and everything, looking for another Reality he could hook on to.”

“Yes, yes,” Williams said. “You’re getting it. It happens to shipwrecked sailors and other people in isolation for long periods too. The imprints fade and whatever comes along makes a new imprint. It happens in Free Fall; that’s why all the astronauts come back mutated. And it happens at the first Millett too.”

“Far Potter Stewarting out,” Simon said. “You mean, I dig red-haired women because my first Millett was with a red-haired girl in high school?”

“You’ve
got
it,” Williams said. “If it had been a young um lady of color, you’d be one of those cats who only like to swing with Black chicks.”

“If it had been with a boy,” Simon said, “I’d be Gay!”

“That’s it, that’s it!” Clem Cotex cried. “If the Finkelstein multiworlds model in quantum mechanics is true, there
are
universes in which you did not take those imprints.”

“Yeah,” Simon said. “I can see myself hanging around Gay bars in one universe, chasing Black foxy ladies in another…. My God, it’s probably true on the semantic circuits too. There might be a universe where I imprinted mathematics instead of words. I might be a physicist or a computer specialist over there instead of a novelist….”

“And,” Father Starhawk said solemnly, “there might be a universe where, with a different set of emotional and semantic imprints, I might be a professional criminal, a jewel thief, or something.”

There was a pause while everybody considered what they had been saying.

“This is all rather speculative,” Fred Digits said finally. “We’re being carried away by our own rhetoric, I suspect.”

“Um another thing,” Father Starhawk said. “People seem to be changing rather abruptly and in strange, unexpected ways lately. Those negative entropy connections and unusual combinations, you know? I mean, people who’ve been Straight all their lives and suddenly they’re Gay or Bi or something. And conservatives suddenly becoming liberals, as if all the semantic imprints are fading everywhere. Stable people schizzing out. Emotional neurotics suddenly becoming mature. It can’t all be the shocks of accelerating social change, can it?”

Blake Williams beamed. “That’s the question I’ve been asking myself for months,” he said, “and I think I have the answer. Gentlemen, all the so-called recreational drugs that have come into wide use in the last few decades may be chemical shock devices. I think people are bleaching out their old imprints, and accidentally making new ones, when they think they’re just getting high and having fun.”

“Wait a
minute
,” Simon said. “Isn’t there a guy in prison in California for the last twenty-seven years or so for saying that? Some psychiatrist named Sid Cohen or something?”

“Never heard of him,” said Prime Time. “Besides, we don’t put people in jail in this country for their ideas.”

“Well, anyway,” Simon said, “even if all these new imprints made with dope are more or less accidental and the people doing it don’t know what they’re doing actually, it sure has stirred up a lot of the creative energy we were talking about. New combinations—bizarre, unthinkable, taboo combinations—are forming in brains all over the world every few minutes. Maybe that’s why the Libertarian Immortalist Party could come out of nowhere and win the election by a landslide. ‘No more death and
taxes.’ My God, who would have thought of it, twenty years ago?”

After the meeting broke up Clem Cotex hung around the office awhile, bringing the files up to date, dusting the
Venetian
blinds, wondering why Dr. Hugh Crane, the most brilliant mind in the whole society, had been so quiet during this meeting, and also speculating idly about how the novel he was in was going to end.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come,” said Clem. He had picked that up from his hero, Captain (now Admiral) James T. Kirk, and he thought it was much classier than “Come in.”

A small, brown, charismatic Puerto Rican opened the door. “Hugo de Naranja,” he said, introducing himself Continental fashion.

“Clem Cotex,” Clem said. “What can I do for you?”

“You investigate the eempossible, not so?”

“Have a seat,” Clem said. “We investigate the Real,” he added, “especially those parts that the narrow-minded and mentally constipated regard as impossible, yes.”

Hugo sat down. “I am initiate,” he said, “in
Santaria.
Also in
Voudon.
I am poet and shaman. I am also—how you say?—goan bananas over one
meestery
all my training in
Magicko
cannot explain. I theenk the Novelist play a treek on me.”

“Oh, ah,” Clem said thoughtfully, “you’re aware that we’re living in a novel?”

“Oh,
si
, is it not obvious?” Hugo smiled, one weathered quantum jumper to another. “You look at the leetle details, you see much treekery, no?”

“Remind me to study this
Santaria
sometime,” Clem said. “It’s given you a broad perspective, I can see. Now, what’s your problem?”

“Poetry, it earns no much the
dinero,”
Hugo said. “I work nights as watchman, to keep body and soul together.
You know? So one night at the warehouse I see thees cat—thees son-of-a-beetch of a cat—and it is there and it is not there. You know?”

“Oh, certainly,” Clem said. “You should take Blake Williams’ course on quantum physics and neuropsychology.”

“Son-of-a-beetch,” Hugo said. “I took that course, but I no pay attention much. Just to get the credit to get the degree. You know? I mees something important?”

“Every modern poet and shaman should know quantum physics,” Clem said sternly. “Specialization is old-fashioned. You see, Señor de Naranja, what you encountered was Schrödinger’s Cat, and Schrödinger’s Cat is only in this novel part of the time.”

“The man from the FBI is here again,” Ms. Karrig said, “with a man from the District Attorney’s office.”

Dr. Dashwood breathed deeply. “Send … them … in,” he said as calmly as he could, clicking off the intercom.

He stared at the door for one frozen moment, still breathing deeply, relaxing every muscle; and then the door opened, and the two men came in.

I could jump out of the window
, Dashwood thought. But then he controlled himself.

He recognized Tobias Knight at once, but the man from the D.A.’s office—who looked like a young Lincoln, or Henry Fonda playing young Lincoln—was a stranger.

“Dr. Dashwood,” Knight said cordially, “this is Cotton DeAct, from the District Attorney’s office.”

“Named after Cotton Mather?” Dashwood asked inanely.

“Named after Cotton Hawes, the detective,” DeAct said, looking embarrassed. “My mother was a great mystery-story fan.”

“Oh,” Dashwood said. There didn’t seem to be any other appropriate comment.

There was a pause, and Dashwood noticed that Tobias Knight looked a bit embarrassed also.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said heartily, “what can I do for you?”

“Hrrrmph!” DeAct cleared his throat. “Dr. Dashwood,” he said formally, “there are two detectives from the Vice Squad waiting outside. They have a warrant for your arrest um for violating Section 666 of the revised criminal code ah Bestiality.” He was actually blushing.

“I see,” Dashwood said. He realized that his breath had become shallow and his muscles were tensing; with an effort, he relaxed. “I’ve known this day might come,” he said with icy calm. “Why don’t they just come in and arrest me, then?”

DeAct took a chair; Knight remained standing—between Dashwood and the window, although not being conspicuous about how he got himself there.

“Well, ah,” DeAct said, lighting a cigarette nervously. “You are ah um an International Celebrity in a sense um people say Freud Kinsey Masters Johnson and Dashwood almost in one breath you might say. Ah there are questions of Scientific Freedom at stake here. Ah there is the matter of our national image ah we don’t want you to be
called the American Sakharov or anything like that ha-ha right?”