The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  David Deutsch must have been thinking about Schrödinger’s little book, What Is Life?, which defined genetic structures in a single world as “aperiodic crystals.” They would be recognizable extensions across many worlds because they would vary less, in their detailed internal structures, than would non-organic matter.

  Each metem engaged in its own quest to tie up loose ends, these immortal beings would fare amongst the worlds, inexorably creating greater order where; otherwise, there would have been lesser. These continuing selves would generate yet more of the “negative entropy,” upon which Schrödinger believed the crystalline structure of life feeds.

  I admitted my uncertainty as to exactly where the events we’d set in motion in the other world would finally lead, and expressed regret that our daughter might not be born to us here. “To be brutally frank, you’re a little old.” Then she surprised me again. “Hey, I don’t think she’d be ready for metem as a boy. If you impregnate me, we’ll have a son, and it’s only fortunate we’re from Texas, because I can’t see any way around having to name him ‘Justin.’”

  “Woman’s intuition again?” The look I got reminded me that, coming from Justine2, this was no idle threat. Her expertise as regards possible futures had to count for something. “Would he be one of us?”

  “I hope to goodness not! A tree doesn’t grow very high without any new branches.” This might suggest a way out of an impasse she presents to me. I cannot yet reconcile myself with her hellish determination toward wasting her young life, by not allowing me to leave her behind when my physical form is exhausted.

  “Want me to live a long time, you’d better oughta take good care of yourself,” she threatened, referencing her suicide in a life she knows only from the manuscript, supplemented by a few glimpses. She emphasized her point. “Don’t even think about doing something like you did in 1945 to me again, or I’ll roast you alive. Believe that I can stay peeved for-ev-er!”

  If not to accept, it became a bit easier to cope with, when I understood that she cannot be measured by ordinary standards of sanity; nor could any self-aware metem. She functions upon some seventy years of conscious life experiences that are not, strictly speaking, part of our reality. While I understand that, there are limitations on what I can handle. I think the promise of immortality should liberate one to fulfill the immediate incarnation. She supposedly learned that before, but I have to take her present viewpoint with deadly seriousness.

  I’ve had nightmares of rolling over on my deathbed and looking into her impish grin as she lies beside me with a toxic IV in her arm. I’ve no intention of seeing this hideous presentiment actualized, at least by these entities we try to regard as our discrete selves. This demands some careful thought, and I know that Justine2 could never abandon her child.

  She was ever the eroticist and, with a brand-new body, she will doubtless continue to be an erotic being raised to a higher power, inclusive of her appetite for all forms of sensation. So we’re probably going to witness some outrageous displays. While advancing age will naturally render me more voyeuristic, she’ll engage in the forbidden just because she can. While I want to build to please her, I questioned some of this. We no longer require physical stress for transit or anamnesis. Isn’t there a time for the hurting, metaphor for the agony of life, to stop?

  “Not liking this! Guilt from other lives is expiated, but I still get hot at the thought of a whip across my bare ass. For cripe’s sake, will you ever leave off whining? If you’re gonna start flogging yourself, now, over the suffering of women, you’ve gotta wait for symmetry to provide you with the alternative.”

  I tried to point out the conditions of Willie’s life after 1942, but got nowhere. “What-ev-er that amounted to does not even relate. You would need to be a submissive woman, not a submissive man. It’s not even the same.” She went on at tedious length with her theory that gender and sex-role changes must be incremental. “If I took metem into a male identity right now, I’d probably turn out a submissive male.” She made a face. “Hurl!”

  I retorted that she was being a bigot, ignoring probable effects of the different brain chemistry, et cetera. “Despite the continuity of your personal experience, I question sex roles being as fundamental as gender itself. Look at the degree to which historical patterns are involved. You won’t find many African Americans inclined to play with our whips and chains, and that’s not all. Go figure personal environment, the degree to which I might be trying to control a powerful mother-figure.” Remembering the fact of Myra Seabrook, I added, “or mothers.”

  The downside of Justine2 lay in contemplation of how many centuries she might be disposed to bicker. “So it’s like that? I’m the fuzzy-thinking psych grad here? Don’t even ask me to believe you’ve come through one more life, still slavishly kissing Freud’s bourgeois ass! Say, haven’t these times chosen to regard sexual orientation as fundamental?”

  “Point, but I still disagree. People, heavily weighted to the ends of the dominance-submission spectrum, may more easily encompass a gender change. I can tell you that, whether they admit it or not, there is not a male dominant who hasn’t, at one time or another, wished he could experience the woman’s position.”

  I knew I had talked myself into a corner, even as it came out of my mouth. “Kewl,” Justine2 grinned triumphantly. “I had a dream last night that you were whipping me but, someway, I was you. So, we have only to arrange the other end of the loop, and we can explore that, can’t we? Foutettez-moi, chéri!”

  We’ll no doubt have many more years of philosophical debates over the creation of and continuing interaction with alternate realities, than it would amuse the readers of this account to contemplate. Isn’t it sheer hubris to speak as if that otherworld were dependent on our intervention? Did it not inevitably exist anyway, along with every other possibility? And the whole set of questions, about the relationship of identities to memories to physical beings, that sort of thing? It would doubtless have been better, had these events befallen a physicist and a neurologist, rather than a psych grad and a playlike lawyer. But this was our story—we, whatever we are.

  Consider the ancient question as to the nature of the Self. In what sense might I be Willie, or Justine2 the original Madeleine? In the strange line of the Justines, one might posit some form of genetic memory, though logically such should only pass on data from point of conception to point of conception. As far as I know, I have no genetic kinship, though Willie certainly liked to imply that he spread his seed far and wide. I only know what I have seen and felt, plus a few memories that I can explain in no other way. And, I am convinced I have his woman, who assures me that I am he.

  Who are these beings that we call “ourselves,” who seem to move across times and worlds, endlessly duplicated and approximated, yet believing our selves to be discrete entities? With every thought we share “qubits” of data with knowledge-bearing matter throughout the branches of the multiversal wave function. “The more it changes, the more it stays the same, and the hand just rearranges the players in the Game.”

  This, too, exonerates Justine2 from an ordinary standard of sanity. We hold sanity to inhere in the degree to which we can objectify ourselves, see ourselves as only the characters of our story and not as its author. Is that truly sane? It is, after all, that “other,” unconscious self who more often has precognitive experiences, and no difficulty in regarding itself as an immortal being, free of linear space-time. True, that self makes little distinction among its psychic contents; memories, alternate worlds, spirits, and fantasies are all the same to it.

  The confidence of Justine2’s convictions is contagious. Does my child by JJ in the otherworld truly represent the lost daughter of her antecedent self? Were that mere wish fulfillment, it would seem that she would be equally emphatic in asserting an identification of herself with that JJ. Rather, she dubiously points out that the conditions of her 1969 encounter with me, which had generated that scheme in this world, were radically changed. With al
l that subsumed into another scenario, she believes she would have chosen an alternate course. I had no sense of that young JJ being Justine—other than via a strong genetic kinship.

  Is there some symmetry principle behind JJ birthing a vehicle for her lost mother as she did in this world for her grandmother? The perpetuation of the name seems more than merely symbolic. The whole curiosity of the gens of the Justines suggests a far more involved mind-body connection than we have yet imagined. Deutsch had identified the basis:

  But now we have come almost full circle. We can see that the ancient idea that living matter has special physical properties was almost true: it is not living matter but knowledge-bearing matter that is physically special. Within one universe it looks irregular; across universes it has a regular structure, like a crystal in the multiverse … 91

  Like a diamond, if you will, its iridescent glory shining into the skies of many worlds.

  In such places, objects extend recognizably across large numbers of universes … as the location of the processes—life, and thought—that have generated the largest distinctive structures in the multiverse.92

  So, we could see knowledge-bearing matter, immortal in the sense that it’s replicated across many worlds, and thus across time, as inextricably bound up with destiny. The life-cycle of organic beings, all the possible patterns of our genetic identities, is our portion of those great structures!

  We could, probably will, go on endlessly. The Fan-Shaped Destiny spreads out over infinity. We will continue to explore it, like adventurers on the unknown footpaths of late colonial Africa or Arabia. But we are at best explorers. Our elongated memories give us only a slight advantage, not ultimate answers. And they tell us more about humanity than about nature.

  And so, at last, this book is nearly finished. I am preparing to print out this epilogue from the PC on Justine’s desk. It sits above the elderly Underwood, still nestled in the desk well below. I reach out to caress the cover of her old copy of No Hiding Place. I think that synchronicity may be as close to the hand of God as we will ever see. I’ve wanted no more than to be at home with her while we completed the account and digitized The Fan-Shaped Destiny. It contains the method for effectuating the transit, the heart of which Seabrook brought out of Africa, inspiring literature and, perchance, some of science itself.

  I have thought long, and can conceive of no greater tribute to those who inspired that body of work, than what I’m about to do. Justine2 is hell-and-be-damned that, in this life, I should take her to live in the south of France to redress what she felt denied before. Her means are hardly inexhaustible, but it’s not out of the question. We will be leaving soon.

  Tonight, after my printout is finished, we will insert the other disk and begin to upload The Fan-Shaped Destiny onto the Internet. If Willie’s fear of dark, suppressive forces was right, what a wonderful thing this late-century technology may be. No longer may books be burned or thinkers consigned to oblivion. From a satellite sailing across the constellations, it again comes back to you, you whom it has actually been with always.

  Kong has gone on ahead of us now. His passing made me reflect that I cannot persuade myself that all sentience does not share in the miracle. Somewhere, Linda has found him. Somewhen, I will have done with looking to the past. On that day, I would like to go with my Justine to a new place, let the waters of Lethe close over us, and awaken in a bright new morning where we can be children together. This is a prayer, as has been my recounting of this whole strange saga. Perhaps, finally, I’m still as far from having seen it all as I ever was.

  Justine2, with her high “psychic” potential, has indeed been able to recognize many more like ourselves than is surmised, even among the devotees of metempsychosis. A part of what she does is the mere application of common sense to manner or speech distinctly out of place, to the unguarded assumption that doesn’t fit in time and space. Look at the reality about us with a new eye, and you will witness much of this for yourselves. She says they move anonymously, attending to their own affairs and, no doubt, avoiding the generation of large paradoxes. She thinks that most have memories of paths through space-times closely related to this one, though a few may recall very different worlds.

  I wonder, too, if there may not be broader meanings to some old religious concepts. Might “born again” have denoted, not a subjective catharsis, but a literal answer to that universal prayer for yet another chance?

  Don’t misunderstand me. We were not and are not saints, and have no ambition to become such in any foreseeable lifetime. If you regard our condition as a blessing rather than a curse, and wonder that people as unworthy as ourselves should receive it, we would first question where the hell you get off—presuming dominion over to whom the grace of God is extended?

  Men and women presumably can make incremental progress during even one life. To our eyes now, our other selves appear cruel and shallow. We are better now and, in the eternity ahead, and behind, and sidewise, the “better angels of our nature” will continue to sit upon our shoulders. Sometimes not so gently.

  It is true; we recall no suffering in villages ridden with Ebola, or of starving in a refugee camp. Our remembered trials were very personal. Let me assure you, that is no guarantee against bleeding out from a hole in the heart. We do not claim to have deserved anything; this is the human condition, consciously recalled or not. “In my Father’s house, there are many mansions.”

  It is New Year’s Eve, the century along with the Millennium draws to its close, and we’re going down to Peachtree Street to celebrate. Justine2 just dropped through, again, to model her scandalous attire for the evening, pleasantly annoying me to remind you that she thinks the numbers of the “born again” among us seem to be growing. Maybe mankind is special after all. Maybe our ability to see the otherworlds, even through a glass darkly, is what distinguishes us.

  Maybe something wonderful is happening.

  Selected Bibliography

  PHYSICAL SCIENCE AND RELATED TOPICS

  Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality. NY: Penguin, 1997.

  DeWitt, Bryce and R. Neill Graham, editors. The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton Series in Physics, Princeton University Press, 1973. Contains the original Everett and Wheeler papers, first popularizations by Everett and DeWitt, plus other material.

  Dunne, John William. An Experiment with Time. NY: Macmillan, 1927.

  ————— . The Serial Universe. Macmillan, 1938, London: Faber & Faber, 1934.

  ————— . The New Immortality. London: Faber & Faber, 1938.

  ————— . Nothing Dies. London: Faber & Faber, 1940 (rev. ed. 1951).

  ————— . Intrusions. London: Faber & Faber, 1955 (finished and published posthumously by Dunne’s wife).

  Polchinski, Joseph. “Weinberg’s Nonlinear Quantum

  Mechanics and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,” in Physical Review Letters, Jan. 28, 1991.

  Schrödinger, Erwin. “What is Life?” and “Mind and Matter,” Cambridge University Press, 1967 (first published 1944) pp. 65, 75. Based on lectures delivered under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, in Feb. 1943.

  Weinberg, Steven. “Testing Quantum Mechanics,” in Annals of Physics, Volume 194, Mar. 6, 1989.

  ————— . Dreams of a Final Theory. 1992 NY: Vintage, 1993–94.

  Wolf, Fred Alan, works, especially Star Wave, NY: Macmillan 1984.

  SELECTED CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION PREDATING THE EVERETT THEORY

  de Camp, L. Sprague, and Fletcher Pratt. “The Incomplete Enchanter.” In Unknown, May and Aug. 1940, first published in book form by NY: Doubleday, 1941.

  Heinlein, Robert A. “Elsewhere.” In Astounding Science Fiction, Sep. 1941. Title was changed to “Elsewhen” in the collection Assignment in Eternity, NY: Signet, 1953.

  Leinster, Murray (Will F. Jenkins). “Sidewise in Time.” In Astounding Science Fiction, Jun. 1934. Published in various col
lections.

  Moore, Ward. Bring the Jubilee. NY: Del Rey, 1955.

  Piper, Horace Beam. “Time and Time Again.” In Astounding Science Fiction, April 1947. Various collections.

  Stapledon, William Olaf. Star Maker. London: Methune, 1937.

  SELECTED PERTINENT FICTION

  Benford, Gregory. Timescape. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1980. Afterword by Susan Stone-Blackburn. Winner of SFWA 1980 Nebula Award.

  Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” 1941. English publication 1956, various collections.

  Dick, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle. NY: Putnam, 1962 (won the science fiction Hugo Award in 1963).

  Greene, Ward. Ride the Nightmare. New York and London: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930. Reissued by Avon in 1949 as Life and Loves of a Modern Mister Bluebeard.

  Matheson, Richard. Bid Time Return. 1975, retitled Somewhere in Time, as was the film. Features Priestley’s work as Priestley features Dunne’s.

  Priestley, John B. Time and the Conways. NY: Harper and Brothers, 1938.

  ————— . Man and Time. NY: Doubleday, 1964 (Crescent, 1987), nonfiction work including the theories of J.W. Dunne.

  NONFICTION, BIOGRAPHY, AND MEMOIRS

  Benford, Gregory. Commenting on Everett and Leinster. In The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Jul. 1993, p. 96.

  Clark, VèVè A. with Millicent Hodson and Catrina Neiman. The Legend of Maya Deren: A documentary biography and collected works, Volume One. NY: Anthology Film Archives, 1984.

  Man Ray. Self Portrait. NY: Little, Brown and Company, 1963. Reissued in 1988 with new illustrations from the Man Ray Trust.

  Seabrook, William B. Adventures in Arabia. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1927.

  ————— . The Magic Island. Harcourt Brace, 1929.

  ————— . Jungle Ways. Harcourt Brace, 1931.

  ————— . Asylum. Harcourt Brace, 1935.

  ————— . Witchcraft. Harcourt Brace, 1940.