Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

"You see," Chaney explained, "I don't want to become a woman. I want to become more of a man."

"Well," said Dr. Glopberger, professionally. "Well, well." It was an ingenious challenge, even with the advances in Sex Surgery in the past three years, but it could be done… My word, it would be a Medical First.

The stocks in Blue Sky were now paying eight thousand dollars to ten thousand dollars a month.

"Name your price," Chaney said with a steely glint.

Justin Case heard about the man with no name at one of Mary Margaret Wildeblood's wild, wild parties. Joe Malik, the editor of Confrontation, told the story. It was rather hard for Case to follow because the party was huge and noisy-a typical Wildeblood soiree. All the usual celebrities were there-Blake Williams, the most boring crank in the galaxy; Juan Tootrego, the rocket engineer responsible for the first three space-cities; Carol Christmas, the man who had invented the first longevity drug, Ex-Tend; Natalie Drest, the fiery feminist; Bertha Van Ation, the astronomer who had discovered the first real Black Hole, in the Sirius double-star system; Markoff Chaney, the midget millionaire who owned most of Blue Sky, Inc. Hordes of other names-maxi-, midi-, and mini-celebrities-swarmed through Mary Margaret's posh Sutton Place pad as the evening wore on. There was a lot of booze, a lot of hash, and-due to Chaney-altogether too much coke.

"The town was called Personville," Malik was saying, "and the man with no name was a detective for a big agency like Pinkerton's. But then Kurasawa adapted it, and the man with no name became a Samurai."

"Of course we can go to the stars," Markoff Chaney was saying, even louder, on Case's other side. "The speed of light doesn't mean a thing when you consider what the next two or three jumps of longevity will bring. There are no real limits anywhere, except in the thinking of the timid and the conservative." He was armed with new Courage.

"Then he became Glint Eastwood," Malik said.

"What's your game?" Juan Tootrego asked, making conversation.

"Oh, art," Case said. "I write the art column in Confrontation."

"But he still doesn't have a name!" Malik exclaimed.

"Then you're the man who discovered El Mir," Juan Tootrego said, impressed. Blake Williams snickered suddenly.

"Everybody this is Simon Moon the President's husband," Mary Margaret said.

The First Man fidgeted in their gaze.

"I'm not here to do any electioneering," he said.

"He's one of the best chess players in the country," Mary Margaret said, completing the introduction.

"Um how does it feel to be married to a politician?" Case asked, trying to put Simon at ease.

"Eve has her thing, and I have mine," Simon said.

"I have a theory," Blake Williams orated, "that the chessboard is a model of the human brain. What do you think of that, Mtr. Hubbard?"

"Mt. Moon," Simon said quickly. He was a Masculinist.

"You see," Malik went on, "whether he's a detective, a Samurai, or a cowboy, he still has no name. Isn't that archetypal?"

"I always look at the bright side," Hagbard Celine was saying to Natalie Drest. "There's only 337,665 years to go in the Kali Yuga, for instance."

"Well, if Batman is so smart," Marvin Gardens muttered, "why does he wear his underdrawers outside of his pants?"

"Pardon me," Simon Moon was asking Blake Williams, "but did you say Grand Canyon should be considered as an artistic whole or as an artistic hole?"

"Why, yes," Markoff Chaney was telling Mary Margaret, "I am working on a second book. It's called Reality Is What You Can Get Away With, and it's about the future evolution of consciousness and intelligence." His Courage was growing.

"Childproof bottles, my Abzug," Marvin Gardens complained. "There isn't a child in the world who doesn't have the patience and curiosity to open one of them."

"He has no name," Malik said, "because he is Death, and Death is a nightmare from which humanity is beginning to awaken."

"It's time to stop worshiping gods," Chaney went on earnestly, "and aim at becoming gods. It took four and a half billion years to produce this moment, and who's really awake yet?"

"It's adults who give up on the damned bottles," Marvin Gardens went on. "They decide-I know I do-'Agh, the hell, I don't need the Potter Stewarting pills.' What they are is adultproof bottles."

"Who is that exciting man?" Natalie Drest whispered to Mary Margaret.

"Marvin Gardens, the brain surgeon. He's married to Dr. Lovelace the uh you know the first woman Bishop in the Mormon Church."

Benny Benedict, the columnist, arrived, apologizing for being late. "I had to see my mother at the Senior Citizens' home. Great old gal, she's taken up tennis again since she started on Ex-Tend."

"Well, yes," Hagbard Celine was saying. "I was a stage magician in my youth. Called myself Cagliostro the Great. But then I got turned on to Cabala…"

"Everybody this is John Disk he's the assistant to Dr. Lousewart at NASA-Ames…"

"No wife, no horse, no mustache," General Wing Lee Chee (U.S. Army, ret.) was saying. "I really resented that."

And then everybody else had left and they were alone.

"Of course there are robots among us," Chancy said, finishing his last speech. "There are also Magicians among us. I think we take turns playing each role, as a matter of fact. The Magician defines a reality-mesh and the robot lives in it. Grok?"

"God, you're an attractive man," Mary Margaret breathed, thinking of his Courage.

Their eyes locked. Because of the magnetism of his personality, neither of them was conscious of the fact that she was looking a long way down at him.

"Let's sniff a little more coke," Chaney suggested.

"I have some cognac left too," she whispered.

"Perfect," he said, and quoted:

Heart of my heart, come out of the rain,

Soak me in cognac, love and cocaine!

They went to the kitchen to get the cognac, and he was swaggering a bit, like Perry Mason about to cross-examine, or the new gun in town.

He patted her Frankel gently. She patted his new Courage.

Then they went to the bedroom, and-after circumnavigating the globe and passing through 1023 possible universes-Ulysses finally returned to Ithaca.

BELL'S THEOREM: A mathematical demonstration by Dr. John S. Bell, which shows that if quantum mechanics is valid, any two particles once in contact will continue to influence each other, no matter how far apart they may subsequently move. This violates Special Relativity, unless the influence between the particles is not employing any known energy.

COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION: The theory formulated by Niels Bohr, according to which the state vector (see below) should be regarded as a mathematical formalism. In other words-which some physicists will dispute- the equations of quantum mechanics do not describe what is happening in the subatomic world but what mathematical systems we need to create to think of that world.

COSMIC GLUE: A metaphor to describe the quantum interconnectedness that must exist if Bell's Theorem be valid. Coined by Dr. Nick Herbert.

E1GENSTATE: One of a finite number of states that a quantum system can be in. The Superposition Principle says that, before measurement, a system must be considered to be in all of its etgenstates; measurement selects one eigenstate.

EINSTEIN-ROSEN-PODOLSKY EFFECT: The quantum interconnectedness as described in a paper by Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky. The purpose of said paper was to prove that quantum mechanics cannot be valid, since it leads to such an outlandish conclusion. Since Bell's Theorem, some physicists have chosen to accept the interconnectedness, however outlandish it may seem. See QUIP.