Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

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 muttered. 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: