Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

WHY?

Why me, O Lord?

–ancient primate question

"I said FUCK THE BLOODY CAPITALISTS," the California writer was howling amid the group at the mantelpiece, below the ithyphallic eidolon.

"Mother very easily made a jam sandwich using no peanuts, mayonnaise, or glue," Blake Williams was reciting patiently to Natalie Drest.

"TV, publishing, movies, everywhere-the extraterrestrials have taken over," Marvin Gardens was warning in his passionate Peter Lorre intonation.

Benny Benedict suddenly had enough of the Wildeblood high-IQ set. He wandered out on the balcony, to look at the stars and wonder, half-drunkenly, why he was so depressed.

After three years the question still came to him when he had too much booze aboard: Why me?

Which was selfish and maudlin. The real question should be: Why my mother?

Or, more to the point: Why anybody?

The world must be mad, that we go on living like this, and tolerate it. The primordial jungles were probably less dangerous than the streets of any city in Unistat. Was this the resultant of the long struggle upward from the caves-a world more frightening, more full of hatred and violence, more bloody than the days of the saber-tooth?

Every time I look at the TV news at seven, he thought miserably, I end up feeling this way before midnight. It's almost as if they're afraid somebody might have a flicker of hope or a good opinion of humanity (at least in potential) or a brief moment of delusory security. Every night, to prevent such unrealistic moods, they have to remind us that the violence and brutality is still continuing.

With a shock, Benny discovered that he was weeping again, silently, guiltily, privately. He had thought he was past that.

So much for booze as a tranquilizer.

He fought against it. It was self-indulgence, disguised self-pity actually. He dabbed his eyes and tried to think of something else. Om mani padme hum, Om mani padme hum…

"Nice night." An Unidentified Man had walked out onto the balcony.

"You don't feel the smog up here," Benny said, embarrassed, wondering if he had gotten rid of the last tear before this stranger had seen him.

The Unidentified Man looked up at the stars, smiling slightly. He was good-looking enough to be an actor, Benny thought, and at second glance he did look remotely familiar, as if his face had been in the newspapers sometime. "The stars," he said, "don't they get to you?"

Benny looked up. "I used to think I'd live to see people go there," he confessed, suddenly sure he had met this man somewhere before, a long time ago. "Not likely with Lousewart leading us back to the Stone Age."

"You're non-ec," the man said, in mock accusation.

"Guilty," Benny replied, realizing that this man was remarkably easy to talk to. "I think that if we used more of our brains, we'd be able to create a world where people would have a right to High Expectations."

"Hopelessly reactionary," the man said, grinning. "You probably still read science fiction."

"Guilty again," Benny said.

"Suppose I were an extraterrestrial," the man said quietly. "Suppose I were several million years ahead of this planet. What one question would you ask me?"

"Why is there so much violence and hatred among us?" Benny asked at once.

"It's always that way on primitive planets," the man said. "The early stages of evolution are never pretty."

"Do planets grow up?" Benny asked.

"Some of them," the man said simply.

"How?"

"Through suffering enough, they learn wisdom."

Benny turned and looked at his odd companion. He is an actor, he thought. "Through suffering," he repeated. "There's no other way?"

"Not in the primitive stages," the man said. "Primitives are too self-centered to ask the important questions, until suffering forces them to ask."

Benny felt the grief pass through him again, and leave. He grinned. "You play this game very well."

"Anybody can do it," the man said. "It's a gimmick, to get outside your usual mind-set. You can do it too. Just try for a minute-you be the advanced intelligence, and I'll be the primitive Terran. Okay?"

"Sure," Benny said, enjoying this.

"Why me?" The stranger's tone was intense. "Why have I been singled out for so much injustice and pain?"

"There is no known answer to that," Benny said at once. "Some say it's just chance-hazard-statistics. Some say there is a Plan, and that you were chosen to learn an important lesson. Nobody knows, really. The important thing is to ask the next question."

"And what is the next question?"

Benny felt as if this was easy. "The next question is, What do I do about it? How ever many minutes or hours or years or decades I have left, what do I do to make sense out of it all?"

"Hey, that's good," the stranger said. "You play Higher Intelligence very well."

"It's just a gimmick," Benny said, feeling as if a great weight had been taken off him. They laughed.

"Where did you ever learn that?" Benny asked. "From a book on Cabala," the man said. "It's a way of contacting the Holy Guardian Angel. But people don't relate to that metaphor these days, so I changed it to an extraterrestrial from an advanced civilization."

"Who are you? I keep feeling I've seen your face…" The man laughed. "I'm a stage magician," he said. "Cagliostro the Great."

"Are you sure you're not a real magician?" Benny asked.