The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  Across the Atlantic, I’d found another pregnant hint from the neglected British giant Olaf Stapledon. He was subsequently as much despised, by the American literary establishment, for the fact that he indisputably produced literature as for his leftist politics. I was hardly innocent of the ominous imperatives that had framed official intellectual bigotry in the United States since at least the late thirties.

  America could not admit quality to exist in the genre in which Stapledon wrote in 1937:

  In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and each was faced with many possible courses, and the combinations of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence in this cosmos.9

  Stapledon had written in praise of the work of J.W. Dunne, an engineer, whom I have characterized “a scientist.” That inclusion will no doubt antagonize a few idiots with sheepskins. Tough shit. Dunne and his great admirer, the author and playwright J.B. Priestley, were vital cross-links within those British intellectual circles of the thirties noted earlier—links that not only affected this sort of literature, but also were major conduits through which the ideas of the great physicists were popularized. Those early writers, attuned to the cutting-edge science of their time, crafted a vision of motion in additional dimensions for a public having difficulty just getting behind relativity.

  ————————

  JORGE LUIS BORGES’S “THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS” presented a labyrinthine analogy for the vision following upon Dunne’s intuition. The great Latin American scholar produced, in “Garden,” possibly the most eerie of the anticipations of the manyworlds. Annotators have remarked that Borges read everything, especially what no one else read anymore. Small wonder that he credited Dunne.

  He described a “work within the work,” a fictional book by a Chinese author involving an “… ever spreading network of diverging, converging, and parallel times. This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility.”10 Set in life-and-death intrigues during the First World War, Borges’s images were so compelling that Bryce DeWitt used them for the frontispiece in the 1973 exposition of the Everett theory.

  Borges wrote those words in 1941, while brilliant young physicist Richard Feynman was putting the finishing touches on his “many-histories,” proposing to explain the path of a particle in time and space, and was being romanced by a shadowy government nuclear program. By September of that year, a new story appeared by Robert A. Heinlein, already gone into war work.

  This was the story of which I had retained the most compelling recollection from my early reading. For months, a fragment had plagued the corners of my mind about a professor’s escape from a disastrous future back to his college days. What was that, I had wondered? Where had I read it? Did it not have to have been written before Everett? When I located the item, it was in a 1953 collection. Heinlein’s Dr. Frost likened time to a rolling, hilly surface rather than a line:

  Think of this track we follow over the surface of time as a winding road cut through hills. Every little way the road branches and the branches follow side canyons. At these branches the crucial decisions of your life take place.11

  Beyond the right or left turns to different futures, he visualized other possibilities, typically missed through tunnel vision. By means of such shortcuts, one could presumably strike out across all possible time or even take paths that looped backward. Heinlein went on to illustrate all the possible departures from “the road of maximum probability.”

  Joe objected, “Couldn’t you say that this is what science fiction writers are supposed to do, predict future developments in theory? One role of the genre, I think, has been to bring the collective consciousness to bear on legitimate thought experiments.” Very much a scientist and not at all airy, I wondered at how he put up with my flights of fancy.

  “Language in these pieces is uncomfortably precise for a thought experiment that hadn’t even been framed yet,” I argued. “Substitute a particle for a person as the subject, and these quotations give you a damned good layman’s description of the manyworlds. Precision like that decades in advance of the theory would not be prediction but prescience.”

  I had paused for thought. “Even if Feynman may have worked out his math during 1941, his famous lectures from which writers have extrapolated were still in the future.” I would soon be reading hauntingly similar passages that lay not ahead of Heinlein’s work, but a decade behind him.

  We’d continued while the wind whipped the trees against the house. In the morning, I would discover that one of my ancient mesquites had been uprooted. Perhaps that was one small portent of the wrenching discoveries I was to make about my own life and motivations. Neither did we ignore the evidence of argument against branching worlds. As with The Door into Summer, Ward Moore’s classic Bring the Jubilee argued contrary to a theory that had yet to be articulated.

  It had become evident that the most persuasive pieces of the old literature had a couple of other things in common besides their representation of the branching paths. One was the consistent use of a “psychic” means of contact, instead of a technological motif. It was the choice even of writers who were otherwise heavily into gadgetry.

  The means employed would involve focusing the attention on a set of symbols, be they magical, geometric, or symbolic logic. Sometimes the mind would simply be attuned to accept the possibility of such a transit, through exercises like regressive hypnosis. It struck me that this approach had greater compatibility with a mathematical artifact, which suggested a “weak connection” between the branches, than did most recent popular fare on the subject.

  The other commonality was that, again in the majority of cases, the contact was not accomplished by a search for wealth, fame, pleasure, and was certainly not the result of any dispassionate search for scientific truth. The motivation was ordinarily a matter of something painful: fear, grief, loneliness, outrage—the deepest yearnings of the human heart, base or noble. It seemed as though the writers imagined you had to turn up the psychological heat.

  That night had been disturbed by dreams. My proposed manuscript had become a “work-within-thework” in the drama of my own life. That life, in turn, was somebody else’s “work.” It was the sort of dream known as “lucid,” wherein one is aware of being in a dream, though I didn’t feel it was exactly a dream—simply a different frame of reference. As I fixed up with caffeine and nicotine the next morning (you must have a good breakfast), I took time to get it down in my journal.

  The scene had been a small yet two-storied brick building on the Left Bank in Paris, to which I’d never been closer than a layover at Orly. It had arches and a courtyard, with an open stairway leading up to… a place where I lived? There was a cafe with a bit of old neon in the windows on the ground floor, and I started to go in but didn’t want to eat alone. I turned back toward the river. All sensory input was present, even to a cool, gentle breeze. I could even hear the wavelets lapping against the cement.

  ————————

  ON THE QUAY stood a girl in gaudy peasant dress, like the “Gypsy act” Linda used to perform. Red curls were done up under a bandanna, and she wore heavy silver bracelets and chains. I knew that I’d been there many times, never before remembering upon waking—been there looking for her. Then I was terrified that this would be like those dreams where you run, and reach, and reach, but fail to grasp.

  I fell to my knees, thinking, Oh God, she must forgive me, though I’d no idea for what. But then she was holding me, and rocking me, whispering in my ear over and over, “It’s me, it’s me…” She was smiling and brushing away my tears. I awoke, clutching the thoug
ht that I’d never felt so comforted or known anyone as beautiful.

  As per the instructions of J.W. Dunne, I’d been keeping a dream journal for months. I dutifully recorded this one, with no clue as to what it might symbolize. I had begun to have the precognitive results he predicted, encountering a sight or hearing a snatch of conversation dreamed previously, though nothing like my heavy-duty experiences of postpuberty. One of those had been a predictable fantasy of sex with two girls, but quite specific, as to location and the details of the clothing I helped them out of. Imagine my happy surprise when that had come true in every detail only a few years later. The emotional impact of the one just experienced had been, however, a bogey-bear. As though I’d been lost in a hell of loneliness and the woman was a saint come to get me out.

  Were my gnarled feelings for and about my late wife an issue? Without a doubt. I am no “yuppie” to mask my pain with pop-psych garbage and persuade myself I had no responsibility. I must have been able to do something more! Could I not have been there one more time for Big Richard, the loyal comrade of my youth, or been a more reasonable influence earlier? And what of a man I’d loved and admired in college, cut down by an assassin’s bullet at the age of twenty-three? Those two other tragedies had ended with discrete events in space and time, the slightest mechanical pressure on a trigger at a given moment.

  I was no simple-minded “born-again,” to take solace in any “grand design,” either. The world of their god is a hideous game of dungeons and dragons; one false step and even the most worthy are lost forever. Not least my little red-haired angel, JJ—was there not a time when another path could have been taken, a wholly different kind of life that could have saved us all? In the bright, empty morning light, I prayed more fervently than I had since boyhood. To whom or what, I was clueless as any modern man.

  I could sense nothing about me but the soulless surfaces of my kitchen. In the abandonment of the material world, I longed for the comfort of my dream-angel. Of what value were my silly bits of precognition if they had done nothing for the lost ones, the gone ones? Was such a weak faculty anything more than just an ironic footnote to a cruel cosmos?

  Other nights of lucid dreams and synchronistic events pertaining to my past had marked the route leading to my sleepy ruminations, lying beside this decidedly out-of-the-ordinary babe. The strangest had been of a ritual dance around a glyph drawn on the ground. Later, I couldn’t remember the symbol, but did recall drums in some far-off jungle. I do not find it in my journal. As happens with unrecorded dreams, while recalling the content, I’ve lost track of exactly when I experienced it.

  The dance, moving around points on the circumference, seemed like life-and-death struggles in linear time, but was revealed as simply a ritual when time was seen as “collapsed” into the design. It reminded me of Dunne’s explanation of the formula, based on the square root of minus one, for collapsing the temporal into a spatial dimension. I knew that the ritual applied to a variety of immortal beings and human families who were under their charge—and something about the relationships among those entities. Might I have revisited that dance, which seemed to have begun from before always, when I would finally drift off to sleep there beside Justine?

  It is possible. Certain impressions attending events, as well as my studies of the science and the literary anomaly, took place concurrently—though you will be reading about them sequentially. I might believe that what was coming, with measured, inexorable steps, had all the definitude of that ritual dance. However, the next discoveries, when experienced, had been perceived in a quite linear history as major revelations.

  At the far end of the history, there had remained no decisive additional source between 1927, when Dunne had offered a partial but useful theoretical context to which the branching paths might be grafted, and Leinster’s first fictional exposition of their function in 1934. Leinster’s treatment required something more, and the same might be said for all—on down to that of Borges, the most elegant of them all, and beyond. What was the essential ingredient added between 1927 and 1934?

  During 1940, the writers L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt had their collaboration, “The Incomplete Enchanter,” serialized. De Camp would soon be working, together with Heinlein, at an experimental facility in the Philadelphia Naval Yards for the duration of the war.

  Along with another coworker, Isaac Asimov, they would establish a “problem-solving group” that submitted suggestions to the Navy on classified matters. I would soon learn that this “Philadelphia experiment” included the informal participation of Murray Leinster. I’d wondered at how we could only speculate as to what might have been going on there, or how it may have related to the “real” Philadelphia Experiment of 1943. De Camp and Pratt wrote:

  … there is an infinity of possible worlds, and if the senses can be attuned to receive a different set of impressions, we should infallibly find ourselves living in a different world… In a world where everyone firmly believed in these laws, that is, in one where all minds were attuned to receive the proper impressions, the laws of magic would conceivably work, as one hears of witch-doctors’ spells working in Africa today. Frazer and Seabrook have worked out some of these magical laws.12

  ————————

  IN THE SPRING OF 1947, a pulp magazine had published the first story by Horace Beam Piper, a selfeducated forty-three year-old employee at the Altoona Yards of the Pennsylvania Railroad. This commenced a career obsessed with alternate worlds that, sadly, was largely distinguished posthumously. Like Seabrook—the source to whom, as far as I know, only Piper and a very few others ever had the courtesy to tip their hats—he would take his own life at about age sixty.

  Some held that Piper believed in the transmigration of souls, more precisely rendered in Greek as metempsychosis, and believed that he knew where he was destined to go. What is a known fact is that, at a science fiction convention in the early sixties, he told writer Jerry Pournelle that another of his alternateworld tales was a true story. Pournelle affirmed that Piper told him, in utter seriousness, that he knew because he had been born on another timeline.13

  With a reverence that you will later understand, I quote H. Beam Piper, “The Last Cavalier,”14 from his first story, “Time and Time Again.” A casualty of a future war had awakened in his twelve-year-old body. With the help of books by Dunne, among others, he was trying to work out a theory:

  “If somebody has real knowledge of the future, then the future must be available to the present mind.” Piper followed through with the questions that Dunne had posed. If there had ever been so much as one actual instance of precognition, then “every moment must be perpetually coexistent with every other moment.”

  He went on to ruminate as to whether some part of the self might not be free of temporal limitations, able to access perceptions from those coexisting instants. He speculated on their generally limited nature and why few provable cases were observed. But suppose one could act on such perceptions, to change an outcome? Would not then some minds, by definition, have observed alternate, actually existing, realities?

  Piper, writing in 1947, knew nothing of communication among the branches of a wave function, much less about notions of counterpart “qubits,” from universes nearly the same, entering into some kind of shared, “covalent”-like relationships. Yet, following Dunne’s logic, he had gone further:

  “There must be additional dimensions of time; lines of alternate probabilities. Something like William Seabrook’s witch-doctor friend’s Fan-Shaped Destiny.”15

  Within days, I’d believed that I had confirmation of my source from publication dates alone. Separating the apples and oranges, it’s true that generic alternate realities had a long tradition in mythology and folktales. Their general use in science fiction went as far back as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Merritt. But the quest for the specific concept of the branching paths, which so eerily presaged the theory that Everett would formalize only by the year of Sputnik, had channele
d down to one question: What was the Fan-Shaped Destiny?

  III

  Seabrook

  BY LATE IN THE REMAINING WEEKS OF THAT BLAZING Texas summer, I had believed that I was becoming well acquainted with Mr. William Seabrook. Possibly the oddest component had been added in late July, when I happened across his autobiography in an antiquarian bookstore. Its tall shelves and musty stacks returned nostalgic recollection of the store in Fort Worth, where I had purloined my I Ching so many years before. The dealer, distinctively enough for a younger man, was familiar with Seabrook’s name, but assured me that none of his books had come through the store for some time.

  Browsing a closed case inside the front door, my first impulse was to be somewhat irked to discover nothing other than Seabrook’s No Hiding Place peeking back at me. I purchased the first, and only, edition for thirteen dollars. The bookseller was as well aware as I that no one else was likely to want the book anytime soon, and I questioned him as to the apparently recent acquisition. I seemed to note in him a particular confusion as to his demonstrated possession of the book.

  As I left my card, requesting to be notified should any more Seabrook material magically appear, the dealer had only been able to lamely comment, “That must have arrived here just for you,” a most unnecessary pitch. I would have cause in only a few weeks to reflect on how unspeakably pregnant his surprised excuse was to prove. At that moment, though, I only supposed that he might have smoked some really good dope that afternoon, and thought no more about it.

  There were a number of other small oddities about this particular find, the first being the good repair of a 1942 volume that had been in circulation. Preserved under plastic was the original dust cover, especially striking in that rubber stamps branded it as having done time in the library of a small college in Oklahoma. The eerie rapport I developed with its content was portended by the sentimentality of a little newspaper clipping that I found to have survived so many years of handling.