Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (49 page)

Of course he wanted to believe that was all there was to it, just a small, oddball cult no more likely to influence events than the Libertarian Immortalists were. But then bit by bit the damning details accumulated. Emperor Joshua Norton, King of the Jews, was a Discordian saint, and Emperor Norton was also inexplicably becoming an “in” person. There was a play about Emperor Norton running in San Francisco, posters celebrating him for sale all over the country. The Discordian mantra “Fnord” was seen scrawled on walls in more and more places, and on the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill. Characters in
Illuminatus!
, who he had assumed were fictional, often appeared writing book or movie reviews for various magazines, and a check showed that they had been writing letters to the
Playboy Forum
and the Chicago newspapers since the early 1960s. Discordian cabals appeared in England, Germany, Japan, Australia, and the most unlikely places.

Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history—brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs. Many of the pioneer Discordians were computer programmers (he remembered that fact every time the Company’s computer answered a simple program with GIVE ME A COOKIE or THE GOVERNMENT SUCKS) and others had documented links with the Libertarian
Immortalists, the LSD subculture, and groups as sinister as the witches and the anarchists.

The Discordians believed that God was a Crazy Woman. For the Woman part of it, they used the usual Taoist and Feminist arguments about the Creative Force being dark, female, subtle, fecund, and in every way opposite to Male Authoritarianism. For the Crazy part, they pointed to Pickering’s Moon, which goes around backward, to rains of crabs and periwinkles and live snakes, to the paradoxes of quantum theory, and to the religious and political behavior of humanity itself, all of which, they claimed, demonstrated that the fabric of reality was a mosaic of chaos, confusion, deception, delusion, and Strange Loops.

And, Drest knew, they were definitely linked with the Network. Although computer specialists only spoke of the Network in whispers, the Company had a detailed file on them. The Network was devoted to the long-suppressed, much persecuted, but persistent underground religion of cocaine founded by the eccentric physician Sigmund Freud. They devoutly believed in the literal truth of Freud’s vision of the Superman. (“What is man? A bridge between the primate and the superman—a bridge over an abyss,” Freud wrote in his
Diary of a Hope Fiend.)
To achieve the Superman, the Network was systematically frustrating every other group of conspirators on the planet by glitching the computers, and meanwhile diverting funds from legitimate activities to subsidize dissident scientists engaged in research on immortality and higher intelligence. “Cocaine is a memory of the future” was the sick slogan of this misguided group of deranged intellectuals. “Our minds will function as ecstatically as on cocaine,
without the jitters
, once we achieve immortality and learn to repro-gram our brains as efficiently as we reprogram our computers,” they went on. “When we don’t have to die and
can constantly increase our
awareness of detail,”
they also said, “we will have no more problems, only adventures.”

Naturally, every government in the world, even the near-anarchistic Free Market maniacs in Russia, had outlawed this bizarre cult.

An even more sinister Discordian front organization, according to Drest’s coldly logical analysis of what was really going on, was the insidious Invisible Hand Society.

What was most devious about the Invisible Hand-ers was that they disdained secrecy and operated right out in the open, telling everybody what they were doing and why and what they hoped to accomplish. They had offices in all major cities and gave free courses in their politico-economic system just like the old Henry George schools at the turn of the century.

It was very hard for Drest to persuade the other eight Unknown Men who ruled the CIA in other parts of the world that the Invisible Hand was the most dangerous sort of conspiracy.

“A conspiracy doesn’t operate in the open,” they kept reminding him. Sometimes they would tell him he was working too hard and should take a vacation.

“That’s what’s so subtle and devilish about it,” Drest would explain, over and over. “Nobody can recognize a conspiracy that’s out in the open. It’s a kind of optical illusion that they’re using to undermine us.”

“But they don’t believe we exist,” he would be told.

“That’s an oversimplification,” he would insist. “They admit we exist and occupy space-time and so on. They just teach that all the titles we give ourselves are meaningless and all our acts are futile since the Invisible Hand controls everything, anyway.”

The other eight would again suggest that Drest needed a vacation.

Things were coming to a head.

The first lesson given to people who signed up for the course of “Political and Economic Reality” at the Invisible Hand Society, Drest knew, concerned policemen and soldiers.

Two men in blue uniforms would appear on the stage, carrying guns.

“Blue uniforms are Real,” the lecturer would say. “Guns are Real. Policemen are a social fiction.”

Three men in brown uniforms would appear, carrying rifles.

“Brown uniforms are Real,” the lecturer would say. “Rifles are Real. Soldiers are a social fiction.”

And so it would go, all through the lecture. Pure mind-rot, and, thank God, most people found it all so absurd, and yet so frightening, that they never came back for any of the subsequent lectures.

But the people who did come back worried Drest; they were the types he loathed and feared. Like Cassius, they had a lean and hungry look and they thought too much.

And they thought about the wrong things.

And now there was the matter of the materializing-and-dematerializing Rehnquist, obviously a Discordian plot, in Drest’s estimation. What other group could conceive it, much less organize and accomplish it? Fnord, indeed!

There had been the case of the Ambassador who found it on a staircase; and the antipornography crusader who encountered it, temporarily painted red, white, and blue, floating in a bowl of Fruit Punch; and that unspeakable incident involving His Eminence the Very Reverend Archbishop of Canterbury; and God knows how many other cases the Company had never heard about.

And President Crane was said to be far more of an oddball than anybody had realized, having strange groups for midnight meetings in the Oval Room, where incense
was burned in profusion, and the Secret Service men claimed to hear strange chants that sounded, they said, like
“Yog-Sothoth Neblod Zin”

Things were coming to a head.

Charles Windsor, Prince of Wales, was about to be crowned King of England.

It was a sacred occasion for all British subjects, still grieving for the Queen Mother, who had passed away so suddenly. But in the midst of the mourning, there was much excitement, since Charles would obviously make a
smashing
king; he was bright, he was witty, he was good-looking, and he had sense enough not to meddle in politics.

There was one discordant voice in the crowd outside Buckingham Palace waiting for the new king to return from the coronation at Westminster Abbey. This was a plump, stately young Irishman who kept singing, off key:

Voices kept telling him to hush, but he would turn to such spoilsports and say dramatically, “The sacred pint alone is the lubrication of my Muse.”

“Drunken ruffian,” somebody muttered.

“Well, what if he is?” the Irishman said suavely. “He still looks like a king, and is that not what really matters?”

“I wasn’t calling the
king
a drunken ruffian,” the voice protested, too emotionally.

“’ere, now, who’s calling me bloody king a ruffian?” said a soldier. “I’ll knock the Potter Stewarting head off any Potter Stewarting Bryanter that says a word against me Potter Stewarting king!”

“Hush,” another chorus joined in.

“Don’t hush me, you Bryanting sods!”

“It’s overcome I am entirely,” the Irishman said, “by the rolling eloquence of your lean, unlovely English. You were quoting Shakespeare, perchance?”

“’ere, are you making sport of me, mate? I’ll wring your Bryanting Potter Stewarting neck, so I will …”

“Here he comes!” somebody shouted.

And other voices took up the cry: “The king! The king!”

Eva Gebloomenkraft, certainly the loveliest woman in the crowd, had been listening to all this with her own private amusement, but now she reached down and began to open her purse, a bit stealthily, perhaps, yet not quite stealthily enough, it seemed, for another hand closed abruptly over hers.

“Rumpole, CID, Scotland Yard,” said a voice, as a badge was flashed briefly. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come along, miss.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury had shared his suspicions about Ms. Gebloomenkraft with the Yard, and they had been on the lookout for her all through coronation day.

But when they had her back in the interrogation room on Bow Street, there was no Rehnquist in her purse.

“I sold it,” she said after an hour of interrogation. And, at their baffled expressions, she added, “It was becoming a
bore. The joke was
wearing thin.
I needed something else to excite me.”

“That’s why you do it, then?” Inspector Rumpole asked. “For excitement?”

Eva raised weary eyes. “When you have so much money that you can literally hire anybody to do literally anything, life does become tedious,” she said. “It requires some imagination, then, to restore zest to existence.”

And all she had in her purse was a self-inflating balloon, which, when the cap was crushed, expanded to a sphere nearly twenty feet in diameter bearing the slogan, in huge psychedelic colors:

OVERALL THERE IS A SMELL OF FRIED ONIONS

When next recorded the itinerant Rehnquist was in the possession of Lady Sybiline Greystoke, who had either purchased it directly from Ms. Gebloomenkraft or had acquired it from some go-between.

Lady Sybiline was an eccentric, even for the British nobility. She was so far to the right, politically, that she regarded the Magna Carta as dangerously radical. She was so High Church that she referred to Charles I as “Saint Charles the Martyr.” She hunted lions, in Africa, and was a crack shot. She was also, secretly, president of the Sappho Society, the group of aristocratic Lesbians who had secretly governed England, behind the scenes, since their founder, Elizabeth I.

Lady Sybiline and her good and intimate friend, Lady Rose Potting-Shedde, evidently found great amusement, between them, with the Rehnquist, for they even took it with them when Lady Sybiline embarked, that summer, for her annual lion hunt in Kenya.

Their White Hunter on that expedition was a red-faced man named Robert Wilson, who, like Clem Cotex, knew he was living in a book.

Robert Wilson had discovered this when somebody showed him the book in question. It was called
Great Short Stories
and was by some Yank named Hemingway. And there he was, Robert Wilson, playing a featured role in the very first story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

It was a shock, at first, to see himself in a book, and it was a bit
thick
to find his drinking and his red face described so dispassionately. It was like seeing yourself on the telly, suddenly observing the-man-who-was-you from
outside.

Then Wilson discovered that he was in
another
book, but changed in totally arbitrary ways that verged on surrealism. This book was a bit of tommyrot and damned filth called
The Universe Next Door
, and he was, in fact, both inside it and outside it, being both the author of it and a character in it.

Robert Wilson began to experience cycles of agitation, elation, anxiety, and a growing sense of unreality.

Then came Lady Sybiline and Lady Rose and that mysterious object they kept in a small box and kept joking about, obscurely, between themselves.

They called it Marlon Brando.

   The river had pebbles at the bottom. They were shiny and small and the water rushed over them constantly and you could see clear to the other side of it if you had your glasses on and weren’t too drunk. Robert Wilson stared at the pebbles, thinking they were like pearls, trying not to remember what had happened that morning.

“After all, it was a clean kill,” Lady Sybiline said beside
him. He wished she wouldn’t talk. He wished she would go away and take Marlon Brando with her.

“The hills, in the distance,” she said. “They look like white rhinoceri.”

“They look like
white rhinoceri,”
he said. “Jesus Christ.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“The bloody hills don’t look at all like rhinoceri,” he said. “They have no horns, for one thing. No exoskeleton on the head. I never heard such a damned silly thing. They look like elephants, actually.”

“Stop it,” she said. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“It was bloody bad,” he said. “Bloody awful bad.”

“If it hadn’t happened, would it be cute, then, for me to say the hills look like white rhinoceri?”

“It wouldn’t be cute no matter what happened.”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s like that.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s like that.”

“Will you please please stop repeating everything I say?”

The water kept running, always running, over the pebbles that were like pearls.

“It was bad,” he said again. “Bloody awful bad.”

“Are you always this rude to your clients?”

“Oh, it comes down to that,” he said. “The hired help have to keep a polite tongue in their heads. You bloody English.”

“You’re English yourself,” she said.

“I’m part Irish. I wish I were all Irish now.”

“Really. You don’t have to
go on
like this. Everybody is a little bit … eccentric.”