“Hey, look where you’re going, Teddy Boy!” shouted the youth, who was wearing a suede jacket, his hair almost down to his waist.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Wells hurriedly apologized, slightly intimidated.
The youth appeared to calm down and stared at him in silence, a vaporous smile clinging to his lips. Taking advantage of this inadvertent contact with one of the natives of that era, Wells asked the youth what year it was, but before he could reply, several anguished cries rang out from the far end of the square followed by gunshots. In the distance, the crowd rose to its feet, and Wells saw a tide of alarmed youths hurtling toward him like a wave rolling toward the shore, and before he had time to react he was swept away. He only just managed to glimpse at the far end of the square a dozen or more mounted policeman riding through the crowd without a care. Suddenly, there was a deafening explosion, and the human tide became a raging sea. A cloud of thick black smoke floated up over the terrified crowd. Pandemonium reigned as people started scattering in all directions. The mounted policemen lashed out indiscriminately, while the youngsters fought back with stones, which bounced off the policemen’s helmets with an ominous crunching sound. Afraid of being trapped in the midst of that spontaneous battle royal whose logic he neither understood nor cared to understand, Wells tried to slip away through a gap in the crowd. He had no idea which way he was running, but he didn’t care, providing he managed to get away from the heat of the skirmish. He passed several dazed youths with bloodied faces, crying and pleading for help, but he kept on running.
All of a sudden, an explosion went off dangerously close, and Wells fell to the ground, entangled in an unseemly heap of bodies. For a few seconds, he thought he couldn’t hear, for the world seemed enclosed in a quilted cocoon of silence. He sat up as best he could and glanced about: through the smoke he saw some youths being helped up and starting to run about aimlessly. He felt an immense relief as the familiar dizziness came over him, heralding a jump. In a few seconds, he would be traversing the universe to another era, which, however inhospitable, could not be worse than this.
But before the giddiness intensified, Wells saw a huge figure wrapped in a black cape striding toward him through the smoke, apparently unperturbed by the uproar. With his cape billowing behind him, brandishing a cane with a glowing handle, his hat pulled down over his face, the figure seemed like something out of a dream. And yet he was more real to Wells than anything else around him. Was this Death coming for him? he wondered, petrified amid the turmoil. When the figure reached Wells, it took him by the arm, lifting him with a strength that could only be described as superhuman. Taken aback by the sinister apparition, the tide of youths seemed to part before him like the sea before Moses while the policemen’s horses whinnied and reared up in terror.
When at last they came to a deserted alleyway, the stranger flattened him against a wall. Wells scarcely had time to rub his arm, which felt as if it had been clamped in a pair of blacksmith’s tongs, when the figure seized his neck with a gloved hand, immobilizing him. Realizing with horror that a team of oxen couldn’t drag him away from that powerful grip, Wells made no attempt to struggle free. He simply confronted the stranger’s face, half-obscured by his huge, wide-brimmed hat. Swathed in shadows, barely illuminated by the strange bluish light seeping from his cane, the stranger’s pale features resembled those of a beautiful, terrible deity. All at once, his lips seemed to vibrate faintly, and Wells heard a voice, distant and metallic, as if it were traveling through a long tube.
“I am Executioner 2087V and I’ve come to kill you. I feel pity for you, but I’m powerless to prevent your fate. Although if you want to know why you must die, you can find the answer by looking deep into my eyes.” Half-dazed, Wells instinctively sought out the stranger’s gaze. “Look deep into my eyes! Don’t stop looking, even if you feel fear or despair, even if you want to surrender. Keep looking into my eyes, until the last moment of your life in this world is over.”
Wells did as he was told, and while chaos reigned beyond the alleyway, he submerged himself in his executioner’s eyes, where two eight-pointed stars shone with an increasingly blinding light before they finally exploded, shooting past him, expanding into infinity and breaking up into the millions of galaxies in a universe. Wells saw all the stars die, and he saw the most absolute darkness envelop the world. He saw a vanishing civilization curled up around the frozen embers of a black hole, waiting to escape its deadly fate, and he saw the face of Chaos and understood why his death was justified and necessary. He discovered that the Executioner felt guilt, and although he was unable to utter a word, Wells tried to tell him he forgave him, and he knew that his killer had heard him, and that in that instant of absolute communication each belonged to the other, and they were both overwhelmed by the ecstasy of the Supreme Knowledge. Despite the intensity of that final thought, Wells managed to keep staring into the eyes of his executioner until the last moment of his life in this world came to an end.
At the precise moment in which Observer Wells saw his twin expire, he opened his eyes and desperately gulped air into his lungs. His heart was hammering so hard against his chest he thought it would bore a hole through it, and his back was bathed in a cold sweat. Glancing about, wild-eyed, he discovered Jane kneeling beside him with a worried look on her face.
“They succeeded, my dear.” His voice was a faint whisper. She looked at him, confused. “They are here, they are here . . .”
“Who?”
Wells slumped back into his chair.
“The twin I connected with this evening . . . he met someone from our world.”
“Someone from our world is here!” exclaimed Jane.
“Well, actually, not so much as someone—something . . . I mean, not a human, but not an automaton either. And . . . it killed my twin.”
Jane looked at him, aghast.
“Good Lord, Bertie. But . . . why?”
“Because that is his job,” sighed Wells. “Because that is why the Scientists from the Other Side created him: to exterminate all those infected with the virus. There are hundreds like him throughout the different worlds. They call themselves Executioners, and their mission is to detect the molecular trails left by cronotemics, hunt them down, and kill them.”
Jane raised her hands to her mouth to stifle a cry. Wells waited a few seconds for her to absorb the information before continuing.
“They classify cronotemics according to how infectious they are, and they call them Destructors: level 1 Destructors, level 2 Destructors, and so on . . . Destructors, Jane! Do you realize what that means? Cronotemics are destroying the universe!”
Jane nodded, increasingly pale. Her husband ran a trembling hand over his face as he tried to order the jumble of images the Executioner had transmitted to him through his dying twin, but it wasn’t easy to express in words the thoughts of a creature that wasn’t human. How could he begin to describe that madness? Begin at the beginning, then carry on until you reach the end, he told himself, harking back to the words of his old friend Dodgson all those years ago. And so he began at the beginning . . .
After the Wellses’ mysterious disappearance, scientists of that and subsequent generations had continued to do research. But it would be hundreds of years before they achieved any notable results. And perhaps hundreds of years too late. Just as the Wellses had always suspected, their old world was moving at a faster pace than their adopted world, and the stars on the Other Side had already started to die, heralding the Dark Era. Time was running out, and in the distant future in which their world found itself, Chaos was imminent. That was why, when the Scientists succeeded in opening and stabilizing a magic hole, everyone understood that this was their final hope: they had used up their last reserves of strength on that achievement; they were exhausted, dying, and hadn’t the energy needed to open another. And so they were relieved and delighted to find out that the tunnel led them straight into a young world during the Stelliferous Age, a world made up of infinite
parallel worlds, many of which were capable of accommodating a homeless civilization. The same multiverse, the same theater with its infinite stages, that they, the Wellses, had ended up in. But, alas, when the Scientists began to scrutinize that multiverse in preparation for the Great Exodus, to their horror they discovered that it was desperately ill.
“The cronotemia epidemic . . . ,” Jane murmured.
Wells nodded gloomily.
“Yes, my dear. The cronotemia epidemic . . . Even so, they didn’t give in. They began studying the strange epidemic to try to understand how it had all started. But the worst part was when they discovered the effect it had. You were right, my dear. You always are. This disease is going to destroy the multiverse. The molecular footprint left by the cronotemics each time they jump causes scarring in hyperspace: they shrink it, making it increasingly brittle and bringing the parallel worlds that make up this multiverse gradually closer together. If that shrinkage continues, those worlds will end up colliding, setting off a series of apocalyptic explosions that will lead to mass extermination . . . The infinite stages will collapse into one another, bursting into a gigantic ball of cosmic fire, and this theater itself will disintegrate.”
“Good God!” exclaimed Jane. Then, after a few seconds’ silence, she added incredulously, “And is exterminating all the cronotemics the only solution they could come up with? I find that hard to believe. How could they be so cruel, Bertie?”
Wells shrugged wearily.
“They may simply be trying to gain time, dear. I expect they considered the death of a few innocents a small price to pay compared to saving two universes. For it isn’t only about this universe, Jane. Unless they cure the disease in time for the Great Exodus—”
“The Other Side will also perish,” Jane concluded in a horrified whisper.
They both remained silent. For several moments the only sound in the tiny sitting room was the crackle of the fire and the elderly couple’s labored breathing.
“Do you remember the day of the Great Debate, Jane?” Wells asked suddenly, his voice choked with anguish. “How everyone admired me! Shouting my name in adulation. If I close my eyes I can still hear them. They trusted in me; they put themselves in my hands. They thought I possessed the truth, and so did I, but . . . Oh, Jane!” Wells sighed, and gazed at his wife. “I lied to you! I was only motivated by vanity! And you knew that, didn’t you? I wanted to go down in history as the Savior of Humanity. And yet . . . can you imagine what they must think of me now, back in our world? Can you imagine our colleagues’ surprise when at last they reached the promised land only to discover it was doomed because of a stupid failed experiment in their Victorian era? All their hopes destroyed by a tiny virus synthesized by H. G. Wells, the biggest catastrophe in the history of the Church of Knowledge, the eternally cursed Destroyer of Universes . . .”
Jane stood up almost abruptly and leaned against the mantelpiece. Wells remained in his chair, lost without her, sobbing with his head sunk between his shoulders, overwhelmed by self-pity. Finally, his wife’s silence forced him to look up timidly. She was watching him weep with that look of fierce determination he knew so well.
“Well, Bertie, if that is what they think of you . . .” She grinned. “Then we’ll just have to make them change their minds.”
28
OVER THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, the Wellses set about elaborating a plan to save the two universes while at the same time changing the disastrous opinion the inhabitants of their world must have of H. G. Wells. Or vice versa. They began with a detailed study of all the information and images Wells had gleaned from the mind of the Executioner, or at any rate everything he could remember or express in words. Apparently, that sinister slaughter had been going on for some time (the equivalent of ten years in their adoptive universe, they calculated). That it had taken them so long to come across an Executioner only made obvious—whether they liked it or not—the infinite nature of the universe. How could scientists from the Other Side eradicate an epidemic that affected so many other worlds? They couldn’t unless someone guided them to the original source of the infection so that they could eradicate it at the root.
While scanning the Executioner’s mind, Wells had discovered that those killers were able to jump between worlds thanks to the canes they carried, whose handles bore the eight-pointed Star of Chaos. Apparently these devices helped them chase cronotemics from stage to stage, burrowing tunnels through hyperspace without leaving any scars in the fabric of the universe, guiding them by working out complex coordinates based on the molecular trails left by the cronotemics. In other words, the Executioners could travel anywhere in the universe providing their diseased quarry left a big enough trail of bread crumbs. And probably also if someone drew a map with mathematical coordinates their canes could interpret.
“Such a map could guide any Executioner, from whichever world he is in, to the exact place and time of the first infection!” Wells exclaimed excitedly. “Or more precisely, to one minute before, so that he could prevent it from happening.”
“And who, may I ask, could draw that map?” Jane asked innocently.
She knew perfectly well who, but she wanted her husband to have the pleasure of pronouncing it. Wells gave his first smile in a very long time. A dazzling smile, brimming with optimism—a touch ingenuous, perhaps, but what did that matter?
“Why, someone with sufficient mathematical knowledge,” he replied proudly.
And so, oozing enthusiasm, Wells dusted off the old maps he and Dodgson had dabbled with in Oxford and spread them out on the table. But one look at those pages filled with formulas, equations, and diagrams was enough to make his heart sink. Those pretentious scribblings were mere intellectual games, ornamentations as brilliant as they were empty, totally theoretical, and never meant to be taken seriously . . . Now, however, it was up to him to find out whether they contained a shred of truth by applying them to a real-life problem of unimaginable magnitude. He had to draw a map, the biggest map of all time and all worlds, a map that would shrink infinity to a calculation of coordinates, a map that would reduce the entire universe to a simple equation . . . He didn’t know whether such an undertaking was possible. And if it was, whether he wanted to reveal life as a mirage woven from the ethereal threads of mathematics, one of his least favorite subjects. But he didn’t appear to have many alternatives, and so he had to try.
He began working day and night on the map, which he decided to call the Great Mathematical Map of Inexorable Chaos. Jane thought the name sounded rather pompous, but Wells was adamant: if this was to be his magnum opus, one that would enable him to go down in history as the Savior of Humanity, the title should reflect that importance. He soon became absorbed in the Herculean task, and once more it was Jane’s task to look after him, as she had during the dark days: making sure he ate, washed, and had enough sleep, besides bolstering his enthusiasm each time he started to flag. Such commitment forced them to sacrifice their beloved sessions in front of the fire as well, for by the time evening came Wells was so exhausted he scarcely had the strength to drag himself to bed.
And while he was shut away in his study, grappling with contradictory formulas, reaching conclusions that rendered all previous ones void, and lamenting bitterly that Dodgson wasn’t there to help him, Jane would take refuge, in her quiet moments, in the cozy little study she had made for herself in one of the spare rooms. Sitting at her desk, where there was always a vase of freshly cut roses, she would spend a few hours every day trying to alleviate her loneliness. She and Wells had decided that she would help revise each chapter, which would require the fresh insight of a mind uncontaminated by the tortuous process of calculating and writing. Otherwise, she would devote herself to solving the no less important domestic aspects of life, so that Wells could work on his magnum opus without interruption. For the first time in many years, this division of labor forced them to remain sadly apart for several hours a day, although I would be lying, dear reader, if I didn’t tell y
ou that, during those hours of solitude, Jane also felt contentment. True, she missed her husband dreadfully, despite their being separated only by a partition wall, for the bond between them was so close they had ended up becoming a single entity. Jane experienced her husband’s absence in every fiber of her being as an unpleasant sensation, like leaving her coat and hat at home on a particularly breezy day. And yet, that discomfort would occasionally turn into an exhilarating feeling of freedom, as if, once she had accepted the inevitable oversight, she had no choice but to brace herself against the wind as she felt it freeze her face and tousle her hair.
However, her husband did not appear to cope so well with those forced separations. Ever since his wife had told him she was planning to make a study for herself in one of their spare rooms, Wells had resolved to spend part of his very limited and valuable spare time trying to discover exactly what his wife was doing in there. Direct questioning had failed, because she merely replied with a shrug. Joshing hadn’t worked either. “Are you drawing pictures of animals in there?” he had once asked, but Jane hadn’t laughed the way she usually did when he said that. Her silence was tomb-like, and since torture was not an option, Wells had been forced to resort to surprise incursions. And so he had discovered that Jane went into her study to write. In fact, this wasn’t much of a discovery, as he could almost have worked it out without having to go in there. She was hardly likely to use the room for breeding rabbits, practicing devil worship, or dancing naked. Besides, she had half jokingly threatened him with it. Now all he had to do was find out what she was writing.
The Map of Chaos Page 47