The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (41 page)

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 Justine
^2.
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 Justine
^2.
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 continued 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.