Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy by Robert A. Wilson Read Free Book Online

languages and hardly anybody could understand them.
    The Jews had served this function in earlier ages because they spoke
Yiddish.
    The scientists spoke
Mathematics.

LOUSES IN THE SKIDROW DIMEHAUNTS
    It is impossible now to suppose that organic life exists only on this planet.
    —F URBISH LOUSEWART V ,
Unsafe Wherever You Go
    Justin Case heard about the louses in the skidrow dime-haunts at one of Epicene Wildeblood’s wild, wild parties, on December 23, 1983. Simon Moon, a creature with almost as much hair as Bigfoot, planted the louses in Case’s semantic preconscious. The whole evening was rather confusing—too many martinis, too much weed, too many people—and Moon was regarded as somewhat sinister by everybody because he worked for the Beast (or
with
the Beast, or
on
the Beast). To make matters even more surrealistic, that intolerable bore Blake Williams was lecturing on the Birth of Cosmic Humanity to anyone who would listen, and several other conversations were going on simultaneously. Nonetheless, Moon had a manuscript with him, and a few listeners, and Case couldn’t help absorbing part of what the mad Beastman was reading.
    “Thee gauls simper at his tyrant power,” Moon was chanting when Case first became conscious of him. What the hell was that? “He is ghoon with this seven-week booths and his mickeyed into mistory. His eyes did seem auld glowery.”
    “FUCK THEM ALL!” a drunken writer from California said, cymbal-like, in Case’s other ear.
    “I beg your pardon?” Epicene Wildeblood, gay as three chimps in a circus, seemed to think the drunk was addressing him.
    “I said, FUCK THE BLOODY CAPITALISTS!!!” the writer explained, weaving a bit to windward. “The goddamn motherfucking moneygrubbing Philistine lot of them …”
    “I see,” Wildeblood said dryly. He did not like people throwing scenes at his parties. “I think maybe you’ve had too much to drink….”
    “Yeah???
Well,” the drunk decided majestically, “fuck
you
too. And the horse you rode in on, as they say in Texas.
    But that lard-assed bore Blake Williams was droning, “The whole problem, of course, is that we haven’t been born yet. In fact, only now, at this point in history, is humanity about to be born.” Williams was full of rubbish like that.
    “About to be born?” asked Carol Christmas, the most delicious piece of blond femininity in the galaxy. Case thought at once that it would be a splendidly wonderful idea to deposit at least some of his sperm within her—
any
orifice would do. He thought this was a brilliant decision on his part, and wondered how to begin implementing it. He had no idea that every male hominid, and many other male primates, immediately had that idea when looking at Carol.
    “Elverun, past Nova’s atoms,” the hairy Moon read on to his small circle of admirers, “from mayan baldurs to monads of goo, brings us by a divinely karmic Tao-Jones leverage back past tactics and aztlantean tooltechs to Louses in the Skidrow Dimehaunts. This way the Humpytheatre.”
    “I still say fuck ’em all.” The drunk was a solitary bassoon against Moon’s keening violin. “Capitalism is a rich man’s heaven and a poor man’s hell.”
    “Ahm yes,” that windy old baritone sax, Blake Williams, bleated to the adorable Carol. “You see terrestrial life is embryonic in the evolutionary sense. In perspective to the cosmos.” Old chryselephantine pedant, Case thought.
    The shrill fife of Josephine Malik, Case’s editor, was heard: “Moon. They say he works for the Beast.” She wore jeans, combat boots and a button saying in psychedelic colors, BRING BACK THE SIXTIES. Walking nostalgia.
    “Floating you see,” the tuba of Williams oompah-oompah-ed onward, “in the amniotic atmosphere at the bottom of a 4,000-mile gravity well. And taking the Euclidean parameters of that gestation as the norm. Totally fetal, if you follow me, and in a very real sense blind because unborn, knowing um the dimensions