"I'll do just that," the doctor said. "A lot of damned peculiar things are happening today. I want to be sure you're not some cohort of that Ezra Pound character." He hung up abruptly.
Ezra Pound, Stuart thought, bemused. The doctor thinks a dead poet and folk singer is plotting against him.
An absolute nut of the first water. A real signifyin' mad scientist.
Obviously, this would require great care. Dashwood couldn't just be discarded as an interview subject for being batty; he was too big a name. The interview would go ahead, but Dashwood would be handled with kid gloves.
The phone buzzed, and he picked it up.
"Dr. Dashwood is back on the line," his secretary said.
"Put him through." He waited, then said, "Dr. Dashwood?"
"Well, I guess it really is you," the voice said. "Please excuse me. A man in my sensitive field-cranks and schizophrenics wondering around loose…"
"Yes, yes, I quite understand," Stuart said, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. "Poets always have harbored nasty grudges." He had no doubt that the doctor was as goofy as a waltzing mouse.
HOW THE TERRAN PRIMATES WERE DOMESTICATED
GALACTIC ARCHIVES:
President Hubbard had abolished poverty through a plan which she called the RICH economy.
RICH meaning Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis.
This was a diabolically clever scheme to abolish all forms of human labor except the most creative-i.e., those frontal-lobe metaprogramming circuits which have evolved last in evolution and surpass the mechanical old four-circuit primate brain functions.
Of course it had been theoretically possible to abolish most mechanical labor since about 1948, when a very cunning primate mathematician, Norbert Weiner, noted that self-correcting (cybernetic) machines would soon be able to monitor whole factories.
Even earlier a metaprogramming-circuit Greek primate, Aristotle, had observed that it would be possible to abolish slavery "when the loom and other machines become self-managing."
Terran primates had continued slavery over the generations, despite the increasing distress this caused their hominid third and fourth (semantic and moral) circuits, simply because machines could not yet manage themselves. As many a primate Utopian had rediscovered in chagrin, under primitive planetary conditions, "somebody has to do the shit-work." The most appealing solution to electing that somebody was to invade a weaker neighboring tribe and bring back a group of biots who could be domesticated.
This had been done so often that there was no hominid pack on Terra that did not show the effects of domestication and slave mentality, a fact first noted by a dour German primate named Nietzsche.
In Unistat, due to the strong encouragement of individualistic third- and fourth-circuit (semantic-moral) functions, slavery had grown so repugnant that it was formally "abolished" within a century after the formation of the pack constitution; it lingered on through inertia in the form of "wage slavery," which required that all primates not born into the sixty families that "owned" almost everything would have to "work" for those families or their corporations in order to get the tickets (called "money") which were necessary for survival.
This slave mentality was so entrenched in the domesticated primates that cybernation advanced very slowly in the first thirty years after Weiner discovered it would be possible to abolish primate toil. All the important primate bands-the alpha male corporations, the primate trade unions, the primate council or "government," the primate totem cults or "churches"-believed that the traditional domesticated caste system was the only possible system under which primates could live. Even the Red primates shared this delusion, differing only in their ideas about distribution of resources.
President Hubbard boldly challenged this domesticated primate thought-form by announcing that everybody who could be replaced by a machine would be replaced by a machine.
It seemed like the end of the world to the primates, at first.
It turned out to be only the end of poverty.
AN APPROXIMATE SIMULATION OF INSANITY
"Any false or partially false premise extended with accurate logic will generate an approximate simulation of insanity." Crossing Broadway at Seventy-second Street, still lecturing, it was Blake Williams.
"Yes, yes, of course, Professor, but if you'll listen a moment to what I'm trying to say," Natalie Drest protested.
"But you see, young lady, most of the premises of our current religious, scientific, and philosophical thinking must be false, or partially false, as judged by a more advanced civilization. What would a Higher Intelligence make of our doctrines of transubstantiation or charmed quarks or the categorical imperative?"
"Well, yeah, but, professor…"
"Then, dammit, will you listen? Most of our beliefs and behavior will appear clinically insane to a Higher Intelligence viewing this planet."
"Sure, it's all relative, I know that, but, Professor…"
"Look," Dr. Williams said with crushing finality, "do you want to fuck, or don't you?"
Her answer was drowned out by a siren racing up Riverside Drive.
"What?"
"I said, I been tryna tell you for ten blocks, Professor, I'm still getting over a case of the clap…"
"That's quite all right, my dear," Blake Williams pronounced suavely. "I'm a broad-minded man. I understand the exuberance of youth, the powerful hormones coursing through your vibrant young bloodstream, the noble refusal of your generation to regard the taboos of old as binding upon the free spirits of the 1980s, and besides, I've reached the age at which I'm not horny every night of the year. You are still invited to come along to my humble digs and listen to my old Joan Baez records."
"Gee, Professor, you know what you are? You're cool. You're not sexist at all."
"Urn, yes, thank you, my dear. I'm just getting old, actually. Now, about the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky gedan-kenexperiment …"
DANCING PHOTONS
The intellectual love of things consists in understanding their perfections.
–spinoza
Linda Lovelace, a projection of light traveling 186,000 miles per second through film of events that actually transpired in Miami years before, is taking first one inch of Harry Reems's penis, then two, three, five, the whole incredible nine inches, and paranoid little Marvin Gardens, hunched in his seat, overcoat in lap, snorts the last of his coke.
It was the forty-fourth time Marvin had seen Deep Throat and the twenty-third time on coke, and under the overcoat his hand was magically transforming into Linda's mouth again, that separate reality where the dancing photons on the screen and the synergizing synapses in his brain joined to produce more than 3-D better than Technicolor realer than real God yes higher than a kite oh Lord.
Marvin was having a rare happy moment in which the extraterrestrial invasion wasn't worrying him.
He, Harry Reems, is about to come, and Marvin Gardens, too, wondering in one corner of his mind about the eternity of protoplasm, because when he conies she'll take it out of her mouth and-splat!-he'll shoot all over her face. Marvin is waiting, but take an amoeba now does it die when it splits? Are there two new amoebas or is it two selves where there was one self before? God, she's got all of it now, faster, call them Krazy and Ignatz say, now is Krazy the first amoeba and Ignatz a twin or are both of them still Krazy, two Krazies instead of one? Jeez, right I down her throat now, and when they split again we have four, she's licking the head now ah that's good and about to swallow it all again, call them say Groucho Chico Harpo and Zeppo, which is the original amoeba or are they all, are amoebas really immortal then? Now now here it comes now one amoeba dividing forever now going on and on for all eternity now a single explosion of DNA seed now now ah Christ Christ yes now now now yes Eternal God oh good.