The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (8 page)

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.

————————

O
N 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 thought 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

————————

I
N 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 channeled down to one question:
What was the Fan-Shaped Destiny?

III

Seabrook

B
Y 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.