Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

All they could see, he said, were the conspiracies of the big capitalists to prevent free competition and to maintain their monopolies. They, the fools, had believed government intervention would stop this.

Government intervention was, to Dr. Rauss Elysium, just like the conspiracies of the corporations, merely another aspect of the Invisible Hand.

"It all coheres wonderfully," he never tired of repeating. "Just notice all the details."

Alas, the Tooth Fairy people were using all the same arguments. They said that if you couldn't see the Tooth Fairy, you weren't looking hard enough.

The fame of Indole Ringh's marvelous temple with the legendary Shivalingam soon spread throughout India, and pilgrims came from hundreds of miles away to look and wonder.

The new cult did not last long, however, because some miscreant crept into the temple one dark night and stole the Shivalingam.

The multitudes were horrified, and even wrathful, when the theft was discovered the following morning, but old Indole Ringh, smiling and spaced out, made a little speech that calmed them all.

"Miracles, like all other things," he said, "come out of the Void for no reason and return to the Void for no reason. Wait. Be patient. Pay attention to the little details. And see what comes out of the Void next."

Actually, the Shivalingam was not exactly returned to the Void, but had merely been transported to Hong Kong.

The King Kong Dong had been brought to Hong Kong by the unsavory person named Chi Ken Teriyaki, who was wanted by the authorities in Japan for selling "American" cigarettes made in Taiwan, diluted shark-repellent, stocks and bonds in a tapioca mine in Nutley, New Jersey, cocaine cut with Clorox, forged copies of the now high-priced El Mir forgeries of Van Gogh, and similarly dubious merchandise. Chi Ken, a half-Chinese, half-Japanese hoodlum, had originally worked for the infamous Fu Manchu and was later part of the notorious Casper Gutman mob in Istanbul. Fallen on lean days, he now eked out a bare living as a police informer in Hong Kong and part-time actor in underground Okinawan porn movies.

Chi Ken purloined the ithyphallic eidolon from Indole Ringh's temple of Shiva because he knew of a fabulously rich man in Hong Kong who happened to be looking for just such an item.

Hong Kong at that time, like most of the Orient, was haunted by the specter of the "boat people," refugees from Unistat who had crossed the Pacific in hopes of a better life. There was no nation in the East willing to accept more than a handful of these pitiful people, and most of them just drifted from harbor to harbor, slowly starving, and hoping for acceptance somewhere.

These desperate people were fleeing the appalling conditions that prevailed in Unistat since Furbish Lousewart became President in 1980.

The man Chi Ken Teriyaki was going to see was named Wing Lee Chee, and he was a deep, dense, secretive person, even more inscrutable than the average Chinese businessman.

Wing Lee Chee had been an athlete in his youth and had even toured Unistat once, performing amazing karate feats in a carnival. His missing right eye (the black patch made him even more inscrutable) was said to be due to an unfortunate incident that had occurred when the carnival was in Bad Ass, Texas, and he tried to use the white washroom at a gas station.

Mr. Wing had returned to China, and thence to Hong Kong, and had grown fat and rich by prosecuting what he considered a judicious and appropriate campaign of revenge against Unistat. He mass-manufactured fake T'ang dynasty art, to swindle the Unistat millionaires. He was the highest-paid informant for the CIA's Far East office, and, due to his knowledge of Unistat, always turned in information that confirmed the paranoid fantasies of his employers but had no connection with what was actually going on anywhere. Through a series of fronts, he had taken over organized crime in Unistat and arranged that everybody would blame it on the Sicilians.

He was currently engaged in smuggling as many as one thousand of the "boat people" a month into Hong Kong, where he put them to work in his factories and paid them three cents a day.

Wing Lee Chee, at eighty-seven, was a philosopher and a man of balance. His life-style always tempered severity with mercy, larceny with generosity, sensuality with meditation. He always tried to be as just a man as was compatible with being a rich and comfortable man.

If one of the employees in his factories showed initiative or talent, Wing Lee Chee noticed, and that man or woman was quickly promoted to a position of responsibility and solvency. He was no xenophobe; this policy applied even to Japanese, Hindus, and the wretched Unistat refugees. Mr. Wing lived on Peach Blossom Street and had a magnificent view of all of Hong Kong and the harbor. He felt that the view was making him more philosophical every year. Each evening, after his twilight meditation period, he would sit at his window, smoking a long black Italian cigar, and look down at the teeming human hive below him, thinking that every person down there was the center of a whole universe, just like himself.

He had learned total detachment from all his own emotions in one split second, the day the white cops in Bad Ass knocked his eye out while arresting him. He had known, in that second, that he could kill them all-no man in the world knew more of aikido, judo, kung fu, and karate than Wing Lee Chee in his youth-but he knew what would happen after that if he did it. He looked at his own rage, understood suddenly in a mini-Satori that this was a mechanical-chemical process in his body, and became the clear mind that watched the rage instead of the emotional mind that experienced it. All of the more mystical and obscure things his martial arts teachers had tried to teach him abruptly made sense. He was never the same man again.

So he would sit, in the early evenings, smoking his foul Italian cigars (a taste acquired from a business associate named Celine) and look down at Hong Kong and its myriad of robots, each driven by mechanical and chemical reflexes, each believing itself the center of the universe. And then he would laugh softly at his own sense of superiority, because he knew that he was also controlled by chemical chains that determined what he could and could not think. Only in very deep meditation, and only a few times, had he broken those chains and seen-briefly! how briefly!-what the hell was really going on, outside of his own mental card-index system.

But Wing Lee Chee always came out of those high moments giggling foolishly, like a mental defective, or weeping quietly at the stupidity of himself and the rest of humanity, or simply dazed, like a man who opens the door to his own bedroom and finds himself lost in one of the craters of the moon.

On September 23, 1986, Wing Lee Chee had two important visitors in his office.

The first was the robot who used the name Frank Sullivan. Wing Lee Chee gave him a neatly typed report full of nonsense and mythology about Far Eastern affairs, which Sullivan would dutifully turn in to Nathaniel Drest at CIA headquarters in Alexandria; Drest would worry even more that the Discordians were taking over the world.

Sullivan gave Wing Lee Chee a cashier's check for twenty thousand dollars, from U.S. Silicon and Sherbet, which was the CIA front for payments made to the Far East sector. Sullivan also gave Wing a check for one hundred thousand dollars, from Universal Synergetics Inc., which was the front for the heroin industry's payments to the Far East. Mr. Wing gave Sullivan a small ticket, which would pass him into a warehouse where the bricks of pure opium would be turned over to him, to be transported via the Corsican Mafia to France, where it would be refined into heroin, shipped to New York, and seized by a cop named Popeye Doyle. The last part of the process, the intrusive Doyle, was not part of the plan, but happened, anyway, to one shipment in two hundred, and was part of the overhead.