The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (7 page)

A movement caught out of the corner of my eye had interrupted my musings. When I glanced about, nothing was there. The dog
was outside, and my living room was silent, empty. It had been too large for a mouse, and there had not been a cat around
for years. Trying to return to my work, I found myself confused by one of those uncanny moments when the arrangement of materials
on my desk seemed quite unlike I had thought I’d left it. I could not refrain from processing the momentary episode in terms
of my fascinations.

Driving against fatigue on the Laredo highway, I’d once or twice swerved to avoid a figure suddenly glimpsed on the shoulder.
Looking back, there would be no one in sight. If we live that near to a hallucinatory state—if just a tiny biochemical change
can induce visions, then why cannot we conjure, almost at will, those beloved images we would most desire to see?

I wondered at such episodes, which all experience with some regularity. Might they not be fleeting perceptions of moments
in other worlds, where the cat
was
on patrol and there was indeed a hitchhiker by the roadside? Might not we appear as ghosts in their worlds, as they in ours?

Could such seemingly random sightings constitute “observations” more sweeping than the alternate paths of single particles?
Might communication among world-branches, “calls” made over an “Everett phone,” be more readily received than visualized in
all the elaborate setups of “hard” science fiction? Might not the technological foo-foo be but metaphor for a faculty more
accessible than our ordinary sense of sanity finds comfortable? If so, what signposts might guide observations along and across
a network of branching time-highways? Did more recent science suggest any kind of grid lines that might be discernible to
a perception extended across a branching cosmos?

My admittedly subjective obsession could focus on at least one demonstrable concern. One thing that I could get my hands on
was the anomaly of the preconception, the notion, of the branching worlds having worked itself out in literature decades before
Everett’s formalism of 1956–57. I addressed myself to this evolution of ideas, from the presumed completion of quantum formalism
in the twenties to the more recent interpretations.

I then recalled an article I’d read some years before by David Deutsch, then a young physicist at the University of Texas
at Austin. Speculating about the future possibilities of quantum computing, he’d convinced me from a philosophical standpoint
that the many-worlds interpretation constituted the only truly rationalist, materialist resolution of the quantum impasse.
⁶

I found a few recent articles by and about Deutsch, who’d become a major theoretician of quantum computing. I was elated to
learn that a new book had just been released. In it, he described the use of an algorithm developed by Peter Shor of Bell
Labs, among the earliest mathematical processes for quantum computer setups, that seemed to necessitate the employment of
computation resources in many worlds simultaneously. Arguing that the classical idea that there is only one universe was thus
destroyed, Deutsch threw down the gauntlet to those still clinging to a single-universe worldview. He challenged them to explain
how Shor’s algorithm works. In fact, that question had been addressed years before the work of Deutsch—or Shor—had posed it.

————————

“T
HERE EXISTS A FASCINATING THEORY
that two worlds branch from every bit of destiny action,”
⁷
wrote the science fiction author Andre Norton, who had begun her writing in “another world,” where it was years before her
readers could be allowed to know she was a woman.

Conducting a systematic search for the specific inputs that had framed my notions, memory returned of hours spent fishing
worn covers from high, dark bookshelves in an old library as spooky and exciting to a boy’s eye as anything dreamed by Ray
Bradbury. Also, the garish covers of old paperbacks and pulp magazines, purchased for a few cents in used bookshops, logically
had to have been from even earlier decades than the hardbounds I recalled. As I recovered bit after bit, the old Halloween
thrill returned to quicken my fifty-year-old heart.

In
The Door into Summer,
Robert Heinlein entertained, then dismissed, the “old” notion of branching time streams. The trick was in the word “old.”
A
notion
might well be old, as old as the fairies in their paraworld beyond the hollow hills, but Heinlein gave one to believe that
he was arguing against a scientific theory. His story was in print months
before
the publication of the theory he had referenced. That was among the mildest of the contradictions.

I had soon begun to go well beyond my own personal time in the pursuit of the research. I didn’t know what my associates thought
of my lowered productivity, as I would sign out into the field, then bury myself in more modern libraries. I’d turned out
to be a really very good labor representative, in spite of burnout from watching unjust spectacles, such as lifetime employees
being sacked while dull and impotent union organizations did nothing. For what little good I’d accomplished, I did not want
to be considered as having gone over the top.

A rep may function quite well being thought of as a playlike lawyer, corrupter of public morals, or even as a goon, but “airhead”
is
not
an appropriate image. That simply would not do! However, as with many of the workers I’d helped with problems on the job,
my position had “downsizing” clearly scrawled all over it. I knew the job wouldn’t last much longer, so I seized the opportunity
to plunge bodily into the questions raised by the developing “temporal anomaly” I was uncovering among writers’ memoirs and
publication dates.

Not alone economic struggle, but life itself seems to decree against discovering that anything our secret hearts long to believe
just might turn out to be the case. We teach our children the “hard facts of life”—not facts unless they kick you back, right?
There is no Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy and, along these lines, your narrator hardly had opportunity to so fantasize.

What I’d expected and hoped to find was that, “somewhere in time,” an esoteric tradition embracing the plurality of worlds
had existed in the physical community, as physicists refer to their collective self. I thought that its notions might have
been processed through the literati until science fiction writers rendered them into print. This had seemed highly possible
in Britain, where the genre was not ghettoized, set apart from literature, as in America.

————————

“R
EADING HARD SCIENCE FICTION IS A POOR WAY TO LEARN SCIENCE
…. The reader of science fiction… may ‘know’ many things that are not so, if only through the process of osmosis.”
⁸

From a standpoint of rigorously proven experimental facts, this caveat should be well taken. However, science fiction fandom
has never really shared this perception. Much as they may deny it, the fans have always wished to believe that science fiction
has presented them with deeper, profounder truths than it was possible to access otherwise. This was even more the case for
those of us who grew up on the old science fiction twenty-five to fifty years ago.

In my quest for information on the many-worlds, I’d turned often to Joe’s resources. A research chemist at a prestigious foundation,
he also happens to be a lifelong science fiction fan. His broad literacy includes the cybernetic, unlike your low-tech narrator,
and he also possesses near photographic recall of anything he’s ever read. The data retrievable from his encyclopedic mind
was invaluable to me, not to mention his ability to encompass the bulk of my personal madness without wincing.

As Joe sees it, while American science fiction today may not be wholly out of the closet, the young reader, unarguably, is
deprived of our earlier thrill. We experienced the reading of science fiction as something of a dirty little masturbatory
secret, hence charged with all the lure of the forbidden. Maybe the effect derived from frequently reading it under the covers
with a flashlight.

For months, I’d been scouring the libraries and bookshops, digging up the old science fiction I recalled from pre-Everett
times that clearly presaged the many-worlds. In the process, I’d identified other, more mainstream literary works predominantly
by British authors, which were clearly germane.

That stormy evening
… sorry about that, but it really was, you see. The gusting torrents and ball lightning had reminded me too intensely of a
night years before. That night Richard, my closest teenage comrade, had entered upon a path of disappointments, on the darker
side of love, which would take his life by his midthirties. It had been a common enough story, rejection by a pregnant girlfriend
in favor of a rival whom an ignorant community deemed a “better catch.” But, from that night forth, Richard had seemed damned
to repeatedly re-create the same failures.

Joe had been in town, and we were at my house reviewing the above-mentioned works. His phenomenal memory aside, neither had
Joe actually read these materials for many years. We were both astonished at how precisely the early authors had represented
a theory not yet formally constructed.

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.

————————

J
ORGE
L
UIS
B
ORGES’S
“T
HE
G
ARDEN OF
F
ORKING
P
ATHS
” 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.”