Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (34 page)

The novel was called
The Universe Next Door.
It existed—was bought and sold and loaned—in a super-continuum called the United States of America, which was Unistat enlarged into other dimensions.

Everything in the novel was inevitable, as everything in the supercontinuum containing the novel was inevitable.

Everything that happened in Unistat
had
to happen, as everything in the United States of America
had
to happen.

That which was above was precisely reflected in that which was below.

To cross again was not to cross.

“So all right,” Joe Malik said, staring at Simon through a triangle, “are you just trying to scare me to death or do you have a message for me?”

Simon was on the balcony of Mary Margaret Wildeblood’s apartment again and somebody was staring out at him in horror.
“My God, it’s Bigfoot!”

Simon reentered the form, and contemplated it.

Civilization was destroyed by nuclear holocaust in May 1984 because Furbish Lousewart was a certain kind of man and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart was a certain other kind of man; and they were what they were because of genetic programs and accidental imprints and conditioning and some learning, and because of the society around them; and that society was the resultant of various conflicting historical and neurogenetic causes; and Lousewart became President because of a thousand other factors, only one of which, the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, was itself the resultant of thousands of factors, including the usual struggles between the engineers and the financiers; and to explain Stuart you would have to start with the institution of slavery six thousand years earlier; and …

Everything in the novel was inevitable, as everything in the supercontinuum containing the novel was inevitable.

And yet Simon had escaped from the novel.

Although not a member of the Warren Belch Society, Simon Moon was, of course, aware of the theory that there was a universe somewhere in which Bacon’s major works were still attributed to somebody else. Simon, naturally, was not imaginative enough to conceive that in that universe Bacon had died of pneumonia while conducting experiments in refrigeration. In Simon’s usual universe, the author of
Novum Organum, The New Atlantis, King Lear
, etc., had lived on to discover the inverse-square law
of gravitation, and Isaac Newton was remembered only as a somewhat eccentric astrologer.

In another novel, midway between the old universe and the new, Simon himself had been shot dead by a Chicago cop during the Democratic Convention of 1968. Over there, Bacon had been bold enough to admit publicly his high rank in the Invisible College (Illuminati) and had been beheaded by James I for heresy. In that universe, not just civilization, but all life on Terra, came to a very hideous end in 1984, because the President was constipated one day and made the wrong decision. Their technology was so advanced that half the solar system went nova along with Earth.

In the next universe Simon explored, we were saved because a red-haired Tantric Engineer named Babs Lashtal gave the Prez a first-class Grade-A blow job in the Oval Room at 10
A.M.
, relaxed his tense muscles, pacified his glands, soothed his frustrations, and inspired him to act relatively sane for the rest of the day. He did not push the button, thereby preserving millions of species of living forms on Earth and thousands of microscopic species on Venus.

Babs Lashtal, of course, was regarded with contempt by all right-thinking people, who had no idea that they owed their lives to her skillful extraction of presidential spermatozoa by means of tender, gentle, gracefully rhythmic kissing, licking, and sucking of the presidential wand.

Even if they had known about it, the right-thinking people would still say Babs should be ashamed of herself.

The whole novel was rather didactic, Simon decided. It was written only to prove a point: Never underestimate the importance of a blow job. It had been necessary to write such a novel because the people over there were so ignorant and superstitious they still called Tantric Engineers
“whores”
and other degrading names.

Every universe is inevitable; but there are as many universes as there are probability matrices. The Metaprogrammer chooses
which
universe he will enter.

There is a love that binds it all together, and that love is expressed in primate language as the love of a parent for a child, so Simon was not surprised to find Tim Moon pervading everything, or at least a kind of continuous Tim Moon potential that could be encoded again in another book or that could remain latent for long times, vaguely permeating every book. There were hundreds of thousands of other Wobs there, Frank Little and Joe Hill and Pat Murfin and Neal Rest and Big Bill Heywood and they were all singing like an outlaw Hallelujah Chorus:

and Dad himself spoke to me, I swear it, saying, “Just tell them this, son: Capitalism is still nothing but a shit sandwich. The more bread you have, the less shit you’ve got to eat, and the less bread you have, the more shit you’ve got to eat. Tell them all.” And yet that seems to mark the experience as brain-generated: the style is
Simon-puer
not
Tim-pater
even if the idea is most certainly something old Tim Moon would want to communicate. A collaboration perhaps between the part of Tim Moon that lives on in Simon’s memory banks and the part that lives eternally in the Mind of the Author of Our Being.

“Hey, wait, before you turn the page and get into the next section, I want to say one more thing. Those faucets on the sink
mean
something. Every time I stare at them in deep meditation I almost remember something important. Two faucets on a sink, one saying H and one saying C. Remember H. C. That’s important.”

The
e
continues to fall.

In spring 1963, while a Mr. Oswald was ordering a Carcano-Mannlicher rifle through the mail, Hugh Crane was in Cambridge, meeting with a famous psychologist who had recently been ejected from Harvard for original research and poor usage of the First Amendment.

“It takes you beyond the body rapture of marijuana?” Crane asked.

“That’s the least of it,” said the psychologist. “It takes you into something like the parallel universe of science fiction. I’m beginning to think they’re parallel neurological universes or different styles of head-games….”

“Games?”
Crane said.

“Life-scripts, novels,” the psychologist suggested, trying other metaphors.

“I dig it,” Crane said quietly. “How soon can I try this lysergic acid di-what’s-it?”

“Diethylamide.”

“How soon?” Crane repeated. “You’ve got a very willing guinea pig, Dr. Frankenstein.”

Cary Grant had already told all the show-biz columnists
that this magic chemical had changed his whole life for the better; Cagliostro, typically, went further and began urging its use on everyone. When the backlash struck he and the researcher who had initiated him and a few other researchers and a couple of famous poets and novelists were widely denounced as “high priests of the drug cult.” He became a favorite topic for the Sunday supplements and the more ox-like men’s magazines—any hack could make a lively story by rehashing his pot arrests, his morals busts, the rumors about other sexual oddities, his public advocacy of LSD and anarcho-atheism, his mantra, “There is no governor anywhere,” and the increasingly popular speculation that his escapes were actually performed through black magic.

It was a disappointment to all the people who loved hating him when he suddenly married the screen’s best known sex goddess, Norma Nelson, and settled down to what appeared to be a very monogamous and un-newsworthy fidelity trip.

Norma herself was delighted that all those rumors about his sadism were obviously untrue. Their sex life was quite normal, and the Mass of the Holy Ghost was performed without restraints. She discovered, also, the basic secret of his escapes: he never accepted a challenge at once, always jetting on “urgent business” to another part of the country and only taking languid notice of the wager, casually accepting it with total cool, a few days later. The interlude, she found, was spent in duplicating the conditions proposed and finding the gimmick that would work and the misdirection that would distract attention at the crucial moment. She also learned the essence of the
okanna borra
, or “gypsy switch,” which is the basis of almost all magic and most con games. The people who thought their own screws, bolts, and chains were used in Cagliostro’s escapes were as mistaken as those who think the handkerchief
with a hundred dollars that they give the gypsy for blessing is the same handkerchief that comes back to them.

She also learned what alchemy was all about. “I thought that was all superstition,” she said once, pointing at his shelves of old books on the transmutation of elements, the Mass of the Holy Ghost, the Cabala, and the elixir of life.

“We do it almost every night.” He smiled. “You have the Cup and I have the Sword.
Solve et coagula
, divide and unite—that’s why I have to go down on you again at the end. The mystic number 210—that means us
two
becoming
one
in the peak and the falling into the
void.
You’ve got the Triangle and I cause the physical manifestation within it.”

“You mean it’s all a code? Why did they have to hide it?”

“Those who didn’t got burned at the stake,” he said. “Read about the witches and the Knights Templar sometime.”

He also began teaching her the Tarot. “Now, the Fool corresponds to aleph in Kabala, the ox, or bull-god Dionysus. But aleph is the path from Keser to Chokmah, and, therefore, the Holy Ghost or semen. The Magus is beth, the house or temple—that is, the path from Keser to Binah, the womb …”

“Do you really think you’re going to live forever?” she asked him once.

“If not,” he said, “I’ll die trying.”

When Simon Moon was appointed Chief of the Computer Section at GWB-666, he immediately junked all the personnel tests then in use and replaced them with a one-question test of his own devising based on the Vlad Enigma. Applicants were simply told the story of Vlad and the monks by an interviewer and asked which monk Vlad impaled. Those who said Vlad impaled the lying flatterer were classified as nebbishes by Simon; they were the kind of fools who still, despite all evidence to the contrary, regarded government and those in authority as honest and just. They would tell the truth to superiors. They were hired at once. “An office full of Eichmanns and Calleys,” Simon said proudly. “Not one of them will ever question an order or ask an embarrassing question.” He could program endless anarchy, and they would never suspect it, because he was above them in the pack hierarchy.

Those who said Vlad impaled the honest monk, on the other hand, were rejected for employment at GWB. Simon called them the Wise Guys and secretly arranged for a recruiter from the Discordian Society to contact them later. They didn’t believe a damned thing government said or did, had heretical opinions on dozens of subjects, and usually smoked dope. They emphatically did not belong in a bureaucracy.

Sometimes Simon called the nebbishes
Homo neophobia
and the wise guys
Homo neophilia.

But that was in another novel. Simon didn’t even know if he was still working with the Beast in this novel.

He was becoming identified with the form.

Some things remained constant under the transformation of the Knight move—Marvin Gardens still had his paranoia and his Vlad the Barbarian books, the missing scientists were still missing, Simon was still a mathematician (Mary Margaret had said so, at the party, even though he was only dimly there this time around).

But some things had altered considerably—Josephine Malik was Joseph Malik, F.D.R. Stuart was an editor instead of a revolutionary, Hubbard was President instead of Lousewart.

But all that was trivial. Simon got out his pen and began jotting, in the margins of
Laws of Form
, the important things he had learned in his out-of-book experience:

1. A novel, or a universe, is a Whole System.
   

2. Who we are, and what we do, depends on which novel or universe we are in. Every part is a function of the Whole.
   

3. It is very hard to remember the whole novel or universe because our horns won’t fit the
   

Simon stared at the page, losing the meaning of Mooning, forgetting the question itself as attention narrowed to this single page, this paragraph, this hotel room in New York on the morning of December 24, 1983, barely able to remember even a few pages back or a few pages ahead.

The window closed. The key was no key.

When Norma became pregnant Cagliostro turned into the stereotype of an ideal husband, canceling bookings to be with her, joyously supporting her decision to employ natural childbirth, teaching her yoga to supplement the Lamaze conditioning techniques employed by her obstetrician. He filled her room with flowers—and with photographs of the moon. (Some of his occult studies were involved here, she realized.)

One night the phone rang, and when Crane answered it Epicene Wildeblood purred, “I’m in Hollywood for a week and I guessed you might want to see me.”

“You guessed wrong,” Crane said. “Sorry. New trip this year.”

Norma’s labor began prematurely, and the doctor quickly discovered that the baby was in the breech position. After a few hours he realized this childbirth could never be natural. She accepted the ether and he performed a Caesarean, only to find the infant, in turning, had strangled on its umbilical cord.