Free Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy by Robert A. Wilson Page A

understood Gilhooley.
    At the time of our story everybody was as confused as Clem Cotex. Most of them just expressed their confusion, or rather concealed it, in more conservative ways.

ANOTHER CIA PLOT
    The spirit of decision consists simply in not hesitating when an inner voice commands you to act.
    —F URBISH L OUSEWART V ,
Unsafe Wherever Your Go
    Just before coming to Wildeblood’s party, Blake Williams wrote one of the most heretical passages in his jealously guarded
Secret Diaries.
He wrote:
    I am an anthropologist,
ergo
a professional liar. An anthropologist is a scientist trained to observe that every society is a little bit mad, including his own. He holds his job by never mentioning this fact explicitly.
       Perhaps 1983 as a whole had been too much for him. In January one of the biggest breakthroughs had occurredat Project Pan, and Williams and Dashwood had to reach new heights of eloquence to persuade the other scientists involved that any premature disclosure could be lethal. At that very time, they pointed out, the John Birch Society was staging massive sit-ins and protests against the introduction of anthropology texts to high schools in Orange County.
    In February the Government Accounting Office announced that all the gold in Fort Knox had disappeared sometime in the past decade.
    In March three new life-extension pills were placed on the market during the controversy over FOREVER, the first life-extension pill, which was widely suspected of creating disastrous side effects. All the data on FOREVER thus far had shown one consistency: scientists not employed by Blue Sky Inc., the manufacturer of FOREVER, continually found evidence of these tragic side effects, and all scientists employed by Blue Sky continually found no evidence of such problems. (That month Blake Williams wrote in his
Diaries
, quoting Lord Macaulay, “The law of gravity would be thrown into dispute were there a commercial interest involved.”)
    In April average rent for a one-room apartment reached $1,500 per month and many families were renting broom closets at $600 to $700 per month or just sleeping in parks. Landlords were hanged in Berkeley, California, and Carbondale, Michigan. *
    In May the missing gold from Fort Knox was found buried at San Clemente. Nixon still denied
everything.
    The new
World Almanac
listed the first UFO cult to reach 20,000,000 members among the major world religions.
    In June the first human embryo transplant was accomplished and the U.S. troops in Tierra del Fuego mutinied.
    In July FEMFREE, a drug which allegedly removed mothering impulses, was banned by the FDA, and UFO cultists and Christians clashed in Belfast.
    In August astronomer Bertha Van Ation discovered two new planets in the solar system, and bootleg FEMFREE at ten times the free market price began to circulate through Women’s Lib groups coast to coast.
    In September UFO cultists and Moslems clashed in Cairo.
    In October landlords were lynched in three more American cities, the first human brain transplant was accomplished, and UFO cultists clashed with Maoists in Peking.
    In November, Mae Brussell on KPFA-Berkeley charged that Jesus had been killed by a CIA plot.
    * Galactic Archives: Rent was a form of tribute paid by non-“owning” users of land to nonusing “owners.” The “owners,” known as
lords-of-the-land
, or
landlords
for short, were originally relatives of the alpha male or king (see Nomis of Noom, “From the Baboon Food-Gathering Band to Consciousness”), but among the higher barbarians, such as in Unistat at the time of this epic, anyone with enough “money” could buy land and become a “landlord.”

A HIT ON THE HEAD
    Every society encourages some behaviors and punitively forbids others. Thus, although cultures were not scientifically designed, they act much like computers programmed for specific results. One can look at their cultural structure and predict: this onewill have a high murder rate, this one will have