Schrodinger's cat trilogy - By Robert Anton Wilson Page 0,43

Sufi cell mate, a heavy cat in more ways than F.D.R. Stuart ever understood, pretended to be unimpressed with this achievement and laid down some stern raps about the perils of “Opening the Gate” without first “clarifying the soul.” The upshot of it was that young Stuart spent an hour a day memorizing a page in the dictionary until he had a vocabulary that would grace a Harvard graduate. Alas, the Sufi was paroled around then and Stuart continued his explorations unguided.

In 1983, in Harlem, New York, Hassan i Sabbah X was the Horsethief of a group known as the Cult of the Black Mother. This was ostensibly devoted to the worship of Kali, goddess of destruction (and rebirth); the police suspected, but couldn’t prove, that it was also a kingpin in international hashish smuggling. The FBI, meanwhile, had their own suspicions; they believed it was a Black Revolutionary Army disguised as a church. An Army Intelligence agent of appropriate Negritude and duplicity managed to gain admission to one of the lower ranks but learned only that: (a) Horse thief was a term for head honcho or boss man borrowed from the gypsies; (b) the rituals were fairly close to those of orthodox Hindu Kali worship, except for certain Masonic elements; and (c) every time a black FBI agent managed to infiltrate the Cult of the Black Mother, he died very soon of a heart attack.

The last fact was well known, and often discussed, at the Bureau. The word witchcraft popped up at least once in each of these conversations, and was quickly laughed down, but each agent went away harboring his own very private opinions. Some of them even began attending the church of their choice even more often than was expected by the rather Puritan standards of the Bureau.

The CIA which actually employed Hassan i Sabbah X as a spy on ghetto affairs, was well aware that he planned to double-cross them at the first opportunity, but that didn’t worry them. They had their own plans for him, which were expressed in their usual jolly euphemism, “termination with maximum prejudice,” a remark illustrated by a finger drawn across the throat to make the meaning clear to neophytes. But that was only for the future, when he began to show signs of shifting allegiance.

Now (it is the night of December 23, 1983, again) while a miniature sled with eight tiny reindeer was allegedly dodging past commercial airliners, communications satellites, flying saucers, and other technocraft in the skyways, two human beings of reprehensible character drove up to the Sutton Place digs of Mary Margaret (Epicene) Wildeblood in a truck hired from U-Haul only a few hours earlier. These were Edward J. Smith and Samuel R. Hall, and they had been purged from the Black Panther Party a few months earlier because of their fondness for the null-circuit neurological program induced by injecting diacetylmorphine (C21H23NO5) directly into their veins. This compound was known as heroin to white people and caballo to Ed and Sam’s Puerto Rican neighbors. Ed and Sam called it horse and mainlined it as often as they possibly could—“riding the horse over the rainbow” was their expression for the null program, and it meant as much to them as Samadhi to a Hindu or the Eucharist to a Catholic. In fact, it allowed them to forget for a while that, to 90 percent of their fellow citizens, they were unmistakably identifiable as niggers, a species generally regarded as twice as ugly and ten times as dangerous as wild gorillas. It didn’t matter, to Sam and Ed, that the people who believed this also believed in the existence of a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft named God, in the Virgin Birth of U.S. Senators, in the accuracy of TV news, and in premarital chastity for women.

Sam and Ed also believed in the existence of the gaseous vertebrate, the immaculate generation of senators, the pictures on the tube, and premarital chastity for at least some women (their own sisters, wives, and daughters). They also believed that they were twice as ugly and ten times as dangerous as wild gorillas, but that they had a right to be that way. They called it Black Pride.

Once inside the Wildeblood apartment, Ed and Sam were as efficient as a pair of vacuum cleaners. To say they took everything that wasn’t nailed down is to underestimate their rapacity. If something that looked valuable was nailed down, they employed pliers and other tools. When they