Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

Joe Malik didn't know from Papa Legba, but he understood the exorcism in his own terms. Papa Legba was the guise in which Thoth, that master Quick Change Artist, appeared in the Santaria or Voudon game. Joe knew about Thoth from Hagbard Celine, who always employed the Cabalistic/Golden Dawn metaprograms when attempting quantum alterations in the fabric of reality. Thoth commandered seventy-eight servitors, each one encoded in his Book of Signals to mankind, ordinarily known as the Tarot deck. Each Tarot card was synchronistic with a different quantum eigenvalue and the arrangement of the cards, when shuffled at random, revealed the Hidden Variable causing the "acausal" quantum jump to the next reality-mesh.

Malik the Skeptic tended to regard that explanation as pseudoscientific balderdash, but Malik the Shaman found it useful as a working hypothesis when critters like Chronozon went bump in the night.

"Zeno of Elias on the other hand my dear reminds us that before the brick can ever hit Krazy it must first travel half of the distance from Ignatz's paw to Krazy's head, but before it can do that it must cover half of that distance that is to say a quarter of the original distance…"

John Disk had originally become involved in morality and ideology due to the Fetus People, as Pussycat genially labeled the antiabortion movement of the 1970s. The Fetus People did not like this description; they called themselves the Right to Life Committee.

Disk was in his teens then and had the usual hormones flowing through his adolescent primate body. He thought he was continually tormented by sinful desires, not understanding the role of testosterone in pubescent primates.

He was a member of the True Roman Catholic Church, a splinter group formed after Vatican II had taken the main body of the Romish religion off into heresy and modernism. The members were survivors of the Irish-American fascism that had once rallied behind Father Coughlin, Father Feeney, and Senator Joe McCarthy. They regarded the English Mass as being almost as sacrilegious as abortion and Social Security as only one step from Stalinism.

The Fetus People or the Right to Life Committee was an amalgamation of True Roman Catholics with the kind of Fundamentalists Protestants seldom seen north of Bad Ass, Texas. They were, like all primate ideologists and moralists, chiefly concerned with finding no-good shits and dumping on them.

They believed the abortionists were in league with all the other no-good shits, including the Rockefellers, the international Communist sex educators, life-extension researchers, cattle mutilators, NASA, and the intergalactic Black Magicians of the Illuminati, under the leadership of the infamous Cagliostro the Great.

They also believed that the Unistat government had never waged an unjust war, that the hair of the seventh son of a seventh son cures warts, and most of what they read in Reader's Digest.

By 1982 the legal struggles over abortion were over and the whole issue seemed as remote as the War of the Roses. This was because a 100 percent effective morning-after contraceptive had been on the market since 1980 and had proven so effective that requests for abortions had dwindled to virtually zero.

By 1983 the economic demand for abortions was about as microscopic as the demand for buggy whips in 1923, after every town in Unistat had switched from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles. Another quantum jump in sociology had occurred.

Actually, the morning-after pill was a chemical abortifa-cient, as any biochemist knew. The biochemists never talked about this in public, since they were all agnostic liberals and it was against their principles to either lie by denying the facts or to help the Fetus People by telling the truth.

As a result of this policy by the biochemists only a handful of the Fetus People turned their attack against the pill when abortion was no longer a live issue. Since the resultant of the morning-after pill was, to the human eye, no different from ordinary menstruation, opposing this seemed exceedingly eccentric even for Fetus People.

The majority of the Fetus People, deprived of their. raison d'etre, began splitting amoebalike into factions and subfactions.

Some few of them, who had really been concerned with the rights of the unborn, became concerned at last with the rights of the born and launched new groups to oppose the surviving vestiges of war, capital punishment, or poverty in backward parts of the planet.

The majority, who had been mainly preoccupied with finding no-good shits and dumping on them, joined organizations like NOODLE (National Organization Organized for Decent Literature and Entertainment) or the First Bank of Religiosophy.

John Disk drifted into White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism, a group mostly concerned with combating parapsychology, psychics, UFO demons, sex educators, cattle mutilators, and, of course, the loathsome Cagliostro the Great.

In 1941 the Carter Brothers Carnival played Xenia, Ohio, and some students from Antioch College tried to throw Cagliostro a whammy with a dragon-headed Japanese condom. His handling of that challenge aroused the admiration and awe of old carny hands; and they were even more amazed by his friendship with Rambo, the lion.

Sandoz, the lion tamer, in particular, was astonished at Cagliostro's ability to sit for hours in the cage, he and the lion staring into each other's eyes like lovers.

"Are you hypnotizing him?" Sandoz asked once.

"Not at all," Cagliostro said, laughing. "He's hypnotizing me. Or maybe we're just learning to get outside our own skins. That's what life is all about, you know-making windows, breaking out of every box…"

The failure of the students to shake up Cagliostro led a few professors to come over and try various scientific devices not likely to be included in any standard verbal code. He placidly identified rheostats, Wheatstone bridges, pH meters, Bunsen burners, and even a gyroscope. The next night they were back with a chemical formula never before synthesized.

"Are you presently able to see the particular object that I have been given at this time?" the girl asked.

And the blindfolded Cagliostro replied calmly, "A test tube. With some blue liquid in it. A copper sulphate compound."

"That's a damned good code," the professors agreed, more fervently this time, as they drove back to Antioch.

(There's no hope of salvaging anything- the suicide note had said- and you're going to have to make it on your own, just like I did. Rosenfelt has destroyed me and he'll destroy free enterprise.)

The carnival was in Biloxi, Mississippi, that winter, and Cagliostro was trying his new gig, combining Houdini-style escapes with his mentalism act. He had been locked in a trunk, and the local police cooperatively used their best padlocks to secure the chains. He settled down to slow, regular yoga breathing-the escape actually took only a few minutes, but he was following Houdini's formula that the audience was more impressed if they had to wait a half hour for the miracle. The yoga conserved the oxygen in the trunk against any possibility that panic, toward the end, might force him into rapid breathing. He timed the breaths against a slow AUMMMMMM, his mind drifted back to Park Avenue and a black maid whose framed picture of a Catholic-looking Jesus sometimes in certain lights seemed to have horns, and he relaxed his hands and feet (there can be no muscle tension in the torso if the extremities are totally limp), bringing her face back clearly, and he heard a voice shouting, "We're at war! The Japanese went and bombed some place called Pearl Harbor in Honolulu!"