The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  “Well, I guess that takes care of me,” I sighed ruefully. “I must agree that, whatever explanations of psychic phenomena we find, physical law is never violated.” She saw me beginning to grasp, finally, that these notions had never been difficult for her. I’d attempted days before, in my vanity, to snow her with concepts encompassed decades past—by a woman from whom the logic and loss of life had demanded embrace of the incredible.

  She looked up mischievously, “Like, I ought to know?”

  “Don’t pull rank. Your transit was from about the time of”—the words kind of stuck in my throat—“your death. Otherwise, you would only remember things before the 1945 encounter with the dream-loop, which was responsible for your awakening in the barn. We might even see that anamnesis as a partial transit. But all this is based on Willie’s ‘science’; Dunne’s ideas plus the branching paths. What did the mambos add to your equation? How did they modify his process to arrive at an event like reincarnation?”

  She shrugged, uncomfortably. “Lookit, I haven’t remembered much. They had initiated me into Voudon. There was a ritual, invoking Legba, down in d’ bayous by an old French graveyard. Y’ know, where they bury the dead people up above d’ ground?” She rolled her wide eyes in a mode previously unseen and shuddered.

  “When I crashed, two who were still living came and tended me, till I went away. But I was way off-line by then. That’s why, with not knowing what they did ’fore I was outta there?” I watched her vacillate amongst personas within the course of single phrases.

  “Why do you suppose, out of all possible worlds, you chose this: to awaken as your descendant? You presumably could conceive avenues that were more direct. If the method is embodied in these notes, you could have just started over, like Willie.”

  “Mightn’t I of found a whereabouts and shape there was no possibility an old reprobate like you could resist?” She giggled nervously.

  “You don’t remember your actual death?”

  She silently shrugged a negative, but then looked up. The green eyes were terrifying as they burned into my soul. “I know that, with my last breath, I was still loving you.” These wounds were severe, and I didn’t want to open them, so I backed off. She made as if to speak again, then all shades of sophistication evaporated as she burst out, with inflections that were near to Cajun, “Nay, pleaze! I don’ wanna go there. Lez nawt talk ’bout grave-yawrds!”

  I suspected she was copping out, but, as she well knew, I would not push it. I backtracked to, I thought, safer ground, Willie’s “cascade of chaos.” “With a ‘forward’ transition, at least you don’t need to be concerned with those problems. From day one, in a branching world that started from a ‘past’ moment, he inevitably would have been behaving differently—even if trying to suppress his familiarity with a similar possible history. Effects would have propagated exponentially.” Benford had visualized causality waves looping between the past and future, the paradoxes they produced giving a new kind of physics—a wave function that didn’t describe mere possibilities, but spoke of different universes.

  “Surely, after first yourself, then Katie, and even Willie were living on beyond your otherworldly death dates, he knew that the advantage of his foreknowledge was exhausted.”

  “I knew that”—she shakily unwound and grinned slightly—”fifty years ago. You can’t relive the totally same past, or you would’ve already remembered so doing. Total déjà vu, an eternal return along the same loop, way hellish!” Then she inquired cagily, “What are we thinking, about all that ‘payment-in-kind,’ death for a life, and so forth?”

  “I don’t believe that. Talk about a concept that’s simplistic! But I can understand how he might have turned superstitious under the pressure of everything that had befallen him.” I saw that this seemed to be of crucial importance to her.

  “You think? Pos?”

  Then I remembered, “Will yet another have to pay the price for a living Justine?” I grasped her hand. “No, babe, no. Maybe his bloodline carried a suicidal gene. Or, remember what you wrote about being ‘loosely attached’? There is no principle in the cosmos that demanded your daughter’s life.” She smiled gratefully, but the dubious look wasn’t banished. “Or, your grandmother’s life, depending on how you choose to regard it.”

  For once, my efforts to lighten things up were successful.

  We went to bed still talking. I thought about Rhinebeck and old New York, their gaslight shining through the eyes of Justine2. What sorts of messages and perceptions might be possible across worlds, which were also across time? All kinds of sightings, ghosts, temporal anomalies, et cetera were newly explicable. Just assume Polchinski’s math did describe something real … but she had drifted off.

  I lay awake for a while, thinking of September 1945—the war ended and the past already being denied. The ghosts of darkening yesterday lingered on verandas or beside wrought-iron railings to witness memory of them being abolished. Two months before my conception, Willie had killed himself. Then the light-world of my eyes had opened upon an art deco hospital’s rounded-cornered wards and tiled hallways, beginning my lifelong sequence of impressions.

  I was now reminded of an essential truth, recalling H. Beam Piper, who had been, even then, crafting his first tale of alternate realities. That truth was simple and yet profound—that I, too, had been born into another time, an otherworld. As always are we all! The revenants of our pasts await us in adjacent rooms; doors within our hearts remain forever ajar, begging just the right nudges. And should the mind perceive that truth to be more literal than psychological?

  Could it really be? I thought of Marjorie, struggling bravely twenty years later to preserve the memory of a man who had been so cruelly thoughtless. How I wished that I had discovered Seabrook’s work back in my youth. I knew I’d have found its significance. Me, at eighteen, or even fifteen, reading something like “Justine in the Mask”? A chapter heading like that would have jumped off the page at me!

  Believe that I would have been in Fort Lauderdale, where Marjorie lived, for my first Spring Break. I might have become her friend, maybe helped her with her book, maybe met Justine five years before The Château … Ye gods, what was I thinking? To still the wave of emotional vertigo, I turned and embraced Justine2. With incredulity and a nagging fear, I had discovered that holding my “world in my arms” had ceased to be merely a romantic expression.

  ————————

  By the 1937 of that other life, I was over fifty and washed up, certainly in my own eyes. King Features having long since recognized my want of some essential ingredient for creative writing, I had returned to The New York Times. I was deemed too mediocre an artisan to be heroically competitive with stars like Walter Duranty, but my only other option for earning a living would have been to accept Lyman’s offer to get me into advertising. In that case, never yet having cared much for the idea of suicide, doubting that I would like being dead any better than being alive, I had accepted a Times posting to London.

  One evening I happened to attend J.B. Priestley’s play, Time and the Conways. Opening to rave reviews, it was just the thing for a moment when all feared that war was again approaching with inexorable step. In that world as in this one, how pitifully brief had been the mere score of years between the great wars! Those, whose fathers, husbands, and sons had been devoured, watched the great beast turn again for them, their children, and grandchildren.

  The play had riveted me with masochistic rapture. The Conway family, brother, sisters, and lovers had survived the War to End All Wars, and celebrated in Act I their hopes for a happy future. The tableaux of their little party were picture postcards of Hope and Love. Act II had moved ahead past eighteen dismal years of failure and disillusion to visit the surviving characters in their regret, recrimination, and hopelessness.

  Thence, in Act III, Priestley had employed his novel time-shift concept. It opened at the moment the first act had ended, at the happy family party. As the young figures conti
nued to express their naive aspirations, foreknowledge of their fates became excruciating to the audience.

  The lead character, Kay, portrayed as an aspiring young writer with a slight pre-science, would be damned to sense the despair that lay ahead. Near the end of Act II, mourning their happy young selves then lost forever, she cried out to her brother, “There’s a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.” You may think it maudlin, but the play intimately caressed the unspoken fears of the coming holocaust, and many of that staid English audience wept outright. It struck like a prize-fighter’s fist into the very heart of me, I can remember that.

  Kay Conway had been comforted in the second act by her brother’s recitation of a theory he had read, that time and reality are other than they seem. “… and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us—the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we’ll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream.”79 But, as the third act ended, the comforting words were still lost in that bleak future. Owing to the time shift, they had yet to be written. I used my press credentials to go backstage after the final curtain. I found myself somehow unwilling for the play to be finished. I, too, had wished for the characters’ impossible dream—of grasping that happy little moment and holding it forever.

  I’d been surprised to find the cast assembled by Priestley around a little man with a large drawing pad on an easel. It developed that he was none other than John William Dunne, the engineer who had built the first British warplane. He had retired from his career to become the dean of Serialism, which, a sense of kindliness in his soft voice, he had been endeavoring to explain to the cast. The actors listened politely as Dunne talked and drew diagrams and equations, illustrating the concepts that had inspired the play they’d just performed, the concepts alluded to in the lines of Kay’s brother. I confess that I had begun to drift as well. Dunne’s ideas went far to resolve the paradoxes of relativity but, in themselves, did little to address the inescapable lot of mankind trapped in a linear time.

  The actress Jean Robertson, who had portrayed Kay Conway, shared the limelight with Priestley. I remember thinking that he loved her. Our eyes met, and she gave me the ghost of a smile, reminiscent of Katie in her better days. Then it all twisted back eighteen of my own years to memories of the best Christmas Eve ever, standing by the gaily lighted window of our brownstone flat, watching for Justine.

  The fantasy had such a compelling texture; momentarily it sounded plausible that, somewhere in time, she was still skipping up the street to be with us. The relief ended, but I had remained detached. The cast members were a small, closed set, with whom I could no more group than could I slip the bonds of time. The sense of meaningfulness evaporated. Standing on the edge of that warm and happy circle, which I couldn’t enter, had become just too painful.

  Another portent had been awaiting me in the lobby. Near the doors, I spied the writer of scientific romance, Olaf Stapledon. He was in the company of the radical scientist Haldane, the friend and mentor of Huxley. That mob were people I had always wanted to know but, as I’d squandered my potential, had never even gotten to meet.

  They had been talking with a woman journalist I’d seen about. At that weird moment, she reminded me of my long-ago young grandmother Piny, who had given me the only fleeting relief I’d ever known from this slaughterhouse of a world we’re encaged in.

  Somehow, I managed to click with Miss Constance Kuhr, and we spent some time together before she left for a United Press posting in Vienna. She introduced me to Stapledon, from whom I learned of the fledgling variant of scientific romance in my own country. Through him, I became acquainted with Haldane, and the brilliant young physicist J.D. Bernal.

  Miss Kuhr, as intriguingly hard and brittle as the other women I’d loved had been pliant, also introduced me to the great Paul Dirac. I’d learned of the new field of quantum mechanics and the outlandish speculations which its creators privately entertained. These excursions of the greatest scientific minds had gone unknown to the public, largely due to the new, dark quality of mystery, with which the governments had swathed scientific research in preparation for war.

  Not long afterward, I was sent to Spain and tried to get myself killed. Missing the big journalistic battles, I nevertheless covered the heroic Brigadas defending that doomed Republic, as they fell back time and again before the onslaught of the dark legions. I suppose that there, whatever my moral failings, candid and complete indifference to my well-being satisfied me that I was not a physical coward, at the least. Yet, it was before the fall of Madrid that I had returned stateside.80

  During that visit, the great devil Time had come for Katie. Long anticipating this, I’d thought myself prepared, but the actuality of burying her at last was devastating. The book had closed, never to be reopened. My inquiries, into exotic realms of science and philosophy, had given me scant comfort. They sounded to be but mere notions, without substance in the face of the awful reality of meaningless death. They might have been fleshed out, had I begun sooner. The saddest words in any language are “if only.” Their whispers follow me still, from that ever-receding far-away.

  ————————

  After the funeral, when there had been nothing left to do in New York except drink, I’d been moved to investigate an event taking place in conjunction with the World Fair. At a hotel in Midtown, it was billed as the World Convention of Science Fiction,a number of the writers directed to my attention by Stapledon in attendance. It had proven an effective distraction.

  I’d been surprised to discover that Will Jenkins, known to me as a feature writer, had been writing scientific romance under the nom de plume of Murray Leinster. Over lunch, he expressed intrigue with speculations I’d heard from the English scientists. He ruminated about the vague old notion of diverse actualities, inherited from the Gothic, but untouched by the new genre.

  One evening, we had aperitifs with a Pennsy railroad detective, an aspiring writer with the interesting name of Beam Piper. A lean fellow with hard and intelligent eyes who didn’t fraternize much, Piper told us that he had been attempting to write stories in this vein. Very much a gentleman of the old school as he lighted his pipe, he nevertheless confided, after a few drinks, his belief that he himself had been born in another reality and had, in his writing, been seeking an explanation.

  Literate as to everything readable from the classics to the modern Ulysses, he was sore about the apparently calculated neglect, even of classical philosophical speculation on the plurality of worlds. “Not even to mention the folklore of many cultures, Gaelic, African, Arabian, which get a short shrift from official science. All those people,” he had stroked his thin mustache and the flinty eyes twinkled with shrewd amusement, “are savages, you understand. It’s not tolerated that we should learn anything of value from them.”

  “But, Judas Priest, man! Surely heaven fills the bill as another reality? A concept, compatible with physical law, that gives to reasoned belief, why, belief in human immortality …” I had begun.

  “Would be as well received as the ‘good news’ of the Apostles,” he’d laughed diffidently. “You can forget institutional learning. Only in a literary ghetto such as ours can such radical ideas be propagated. Nevertheless, we need the raw materials, the research of science. It’s too bad that some adventurer hasn’t taken up the challenge of going to the deserts and jungles to ferret out the wisdom from time immemorial.”

  In the clubby atmosphere around the billiard tables, Piper had waxed effusive on his subject—uncharacteristically, Jenkins had whispered to me. He detailed plans for books, including the notion of volitional suicide as a means of transport between actualities. I asked if he meant reincarnation.

  “Don’t like that term,” he complained, “but we may be stuck with it in writing for the public. It’s an approximation of a Sanskrit word that’s far too vague. The Greeks had a more exacting concept, metempsychosis, the transference or transmigratio
n of the soul.” I’d wanted to explore Piper’s odd assertion that he’d experienced multiple realities, but he was back on track of the reasons their genre was so queerly despised in America.

  “There hasn’t been enough science worth spitting at in the States,” Jenkins had interjected, “only technology. We’ll get real scientists—now that they’re fleeing Europe.” But he held that conditions for scientific romance would not change for a long while more. “The rancid blanket of state security is coming down over speculation as well as science itself.” He confided, in low tones, rumors of bureaus conceived during the World War, mandated to contain information in an emergency. When war came, the “emergency” measures might become permanent.

  “Patriotic caution,” he’d warned, “becomes an obsession for control that may inhibit popular comprehension for the rest of the century. Your friends Bernal and Haldane have already landed on the sedition list,” he’d nodded to me, “for trying to democratize scientific information, as much as for their pinko politics.”

  As we had taken our leave, I recalled Piper’s comparison with the Gospels, and asked his thoughts about religion’s attitude toward such questions. “Say, fellow,” he’d chuckled sadly. “Priestcraft has hope reserved to the somehow-good. You know … the Scopes trial was just jake with them, wasn’t it? The Church contains inquiry, religious and otherwise. It’s a strange thing about the mentalities that take such comfort in a vague belief that ‘everything happens for a reason.’ Spell those reasons out, and all you see are backsides headed out the door!”

  The encounter with Piper was so pregnant with shades of meaning for me, in an other life, that I’ve quoted as much as I can recall. I’m in his debt, in any world, and I wish him well. I believe he was in the same boat as me, and would recall his thought, that in the magic of distant jungles and deserts might lie answers as pertinent as in the halls of physics.