Explorations: The Roots of H. B. Piper’s Dhergabar
I’m a huge fan of H. Beam Piper’s Paratime Police stories. They were published in Astounding magazine and then in Analog magazine (same magazine, new snazzy title) between 1948 and 1965. Piper’s final story of the series, Down Styphon, was published posthumously after his untimely death in late 1964.
Briefly, the Paratime series is about a futuristic human society living on a parallel Earth. The culture has developed dimensional travel and carefully exploits chosen timelines for resources. Their dimensional travel device is called the Ghaldron-Hesthor field-generator (also known as the “paratime transposition conveyor”) and is the most cherished secret of that race. They do a lot to maintain the secret, including an entire policing organization called, the Paratime Police.
During the long history of their race, they have explored an undisclosed number of parallel timelines. They’ve also devised a comprehensive grouping system beginning with five probability levels. These are based around a single divergent point—human colonists arriving from Mars to Terra seventy-five thousand years ago. The “Home Timeline,” including Paratime Police headquarters, is top of the heap—the primary reference point for all First Level timelines. On this probability level Martian colonization was fully successful and (presumably) all of the resources of Martian culture and technology were at their disposal. On the Second Level of probability, one or more shiploads of colonists became established on Terra but were subsequently cut off from the home planet and forced to develop a civilization of their own. The Third Level probabilities descend from a few Martian colonists who settled but lost all vestiges of their original Martian culture, even the memory of their extraterrestrial origins. On the Fourth Level (ours) Martian colonists met with some disaster and lost all memory of their extraterrestrial origins, as well as extraterrestrial culture. They differ from Third Level probabilities by taking a lot longer to build up their civilizations, seemingly “culturally-challenged” in some way. On the Fifth Level of probability all colonization attempts ended in failure and on that level no true humans developed. The First Level culture uses the Fifth Level probability timelines as sorts of “bedroom communities” for commerce and other essential services. For example, there is Fifth Level timeline completely devoted to Paratime Police operations which is referred to as, PolTerm.
Dhergabar is the primary First Level city we see on Home Timeline. Dhergabar has always struck me as a strange word. Etymologically, it seems vaguely East Indian and I’ve wondered about it for years. It sounds a wee bit familiar to my ears but where had I heard it before?
At one point I happened upon an interview with Piper where he mentioned a great fondness for The Arabian Nights. At this mention a light bulb popped off in my head and I suddenly understood why the name seemed so familiar. I, too, have always loved, The Arabian Nights. I have a collection of different volumes in my personal library. I recalled that there was a story alternately called, The History of Codadad and His Brothers or The Story of the Wicked Half-Brothers. And there was also a story connected to it called, The Story of the Princess of Deryabar.
Dhergabar and Deryabar seem awfully close in spelling and sound, don’t they?
Scanning through those two Arabian Nights tales I discovered a passage from The Story of the Wicked Half-Brothers which cinched the connection in my mind.
“Not so!” replied the king. “From the Princess of Deryabar alone have I learned the truth. For she it was who came to demand vengeance for the crime which your brothers would still have concealed.” —Stories of the Arabian Nights (1911) retold by Laurence Houseman.
So there’s a princess from a country called Deryabar who is a dogged seeker after justice. Could this story have been the inspiration for Dhergabar and, in some way, the Paratime Police?
Some of the Third Level people we meet in the Paratime Police story—Time Crime (1955)— seem very much like Arabian Nights characters. They are “theatrically” Arabian with long daggers, long robes, good horses and speak in a style suggestive of Muslim North Africa (despite actually living in North America.)
If you’ve read a few different editions of The Arabian Nights, you’ll know that the stories chosen for inclusion vary a little, or a lot, depending. The original translations are many volumes in length and not for children. The version I’ve quoted above, Stories of the Arabian Nights, was published in 1911 when Piper was still a boy. (He was born in 1904.) It wasn’t the only version out at the time, but it was popular due to wonderful Edmond Dulac illustrations. Could he have read the story from this edition? There’s no way to know for sure, of course, but to me it seems a distinct possibility.
This sort of literary detective work is always fun, like constructing a complex puzzle. It’s all guess work but what if it were true—wouldn’t that just be something?
This is the Rocketeer signing off for today.