Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

THE SYMPOSIUM

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. Schrodinger 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."

"Urn 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 impossible, 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, Senor de Naranja, what you encountered was Schrodinger's Cat, and Schrodinger's Cat is only in this novel part of the time."