Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

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 Metapro-grammer 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-pwer 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.

The future exists first in Imagination, then in Will, then in Reality.

–eve hubbard

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."

Gary 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 Galleys," 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.