The Map of the Sky

by Félix J Palma

  “As you see, Mr. Winslow, we can’t possibly travel to the year 2000.”

  I shrugged, amused by what was undoubtedly a minor setback.

  “In that case, I’m afraid we’ll just have to defeat the Martians by ourselves, Captain,” I replied, grinning.

  XXXIII

  IN THE PRISON CAMP THE FOLLOWING DAY, Charles at last spotted Shackleton at breakfast. He glimpsed him in the distance, sitting on a rock eating his puree. As he had anticipated, the captain had returned from the breeding camp wearing the same gloomy expression he had probably left with. And this could only mean one thing. Charles approached, greeting him with a worried look, and sat down beside him, swamped by the enormous overcoat he had been given when the last lot of clothing had been doled out. Judging by the second-rate workmanship and rough material, the item had probably belonged to a tradesman, not that Charles hadn’t long since ceased caring about something as insignificant as wearing the clothes of a lowly commoner. He gazed silently at Shackleton, hoping his friend would feel the need to speak to him.

  Once a week, the Martians would march a handful of the healthiest-looking male specimens to a nearby camp where they kept the youngest, most fertile women. Every member of this procession was forced to couple with one of the women, under the watchful eye of the Martians, and was then brought back, without knowing whether his seed had taken root. This way the Martians were sure to have a plentiful supply of slaves to carry out the arduous task of conditioning the planet. During the first few months of his internment, when he still looked like a specimen worth perpetuating, Charles had been regularly chosen, but hard labor and malnutrition had ruined his looks to the point where no Martian deemed his seed could produce anything satisfactory. Shackleton, on the other hand, was chosen almost every week, because the captain had contrived to keep his robust shape by eating everything he could lay his hands on (more than once Charles had surprised him scraping the bowls in the pile) and even exercising at night alone in his cell. At first, Charles hadn’t been able to comprehend Shackleton’s dogged refusal to waste away, to let his body become a dried-up husk like his own. Later he understood his reasoning: if Shackleton stayed in shape, he was more likely to be taken to the women’s camp, and consequently more likely to be able to find Claire, whom he had not laid eyes on since the day Charles persuaded him to leave the basement of the house in Queen’s Gate to fulfill a destiny that was subsequently shown to be mistaken.

  They sat facing each other, eating their breakfast in silence. Charles knew without having to ask that the captain had not spotted Claire among the other women this time either. And as always, he felt guilty for having made Shackleton leave his uncle’s basement. Charles had had plenty of time over the past few years to regret many things he had done in his life, but there was nothing he regretted so much as having separated Derek from his wife. In the first few months of their captivity, the captain had nurtured exaggerated hopes of an uprising. But those were the early days, when Shackleton still believed his wife was safe in the basement at Queen’s Gate, and he could think of nothing else but returning to her side, the days when he was still incapable of imagining how the invasion would turn out, much less envisaging life without the woman for whom he had traveled back in time. However, thanks to Charles’s disastrous intervention, that is what had happened, and during the first few months in the prison camp, Shackleton had spent all his time thinking up ways of escaping in order to find Claire. He had elaborated plan after plan, which would have raised Charles’s hopes, too, had not each of his ideas appeared wilder and more desperate than the one before: he wanted to sew all the bedsheets in the camp together and leap from the top of the pyramid and glide through the air; he wanted to escape through the funnel, to organize an uprising in the women’s camp. These madcap escape plans, which he would convey in a garbled fashion to a few randomly chosen prisoners, only showed how much he longed to find Claire. He devoted all his thoughts, all his energy to that. And when Charles protested that she could be anywhere (he never had the heart to suggest she might be dead), that she might have left England, the captain always replied that he had traveled even farther the first time to be with her.

  Gradually he had begun to speak less and less about his harebrained schemes. Shackleton’s hopes of escape, of forming a resistance group out of the ravaged prisoners, of attacking camp after camp, of visiting every destroyed city in which groups of fugitives were hiding out, of crossing the whole planet if necessary to find his wife were reduced to weary comments, spoken without conviction, which petered out as the months went by. Never again did Shackleton mention the word “escape.” All he did now was await the new batches of females with which they replenished the women’s prison camps, clinging to the hope that one day he would recognize Claire among the women filling the breeding pavilions, whose pointed rooftops could be seen on sunny days glittering in the distance like a sea of bristles. But why? Charles thought; what was the point of finding her in this situation, in these dark days where they could have no hope, only the pain of knowing they were still alive and suffering?

  One day, also during breakfast, the captain’s irrepressible, absurd optimism had brought out the old cynic in Charles. He had immediately asked Shackleton cruelly, And what would you say to her, Derek, if you did eventually find her? The captain had looked at him in surprise, remaining silent for a long time, before dredging up a reply from the deep well of sorrow that was his soul: I would beg her forgiveness, he had said. I would say to her: forgive me for having lied to you, Claire. When Charles heard this he had tried to cheer Shackleton up, insisting that Claire could not possibly blame him for having wanted to stop the invasion. On the contrary, Charles had said, she would be proud of you for trying, for keeping the promise you made to her in the basement at Queen’s Gate, and . . . But the captain had dismissed Charles’s clumsy attempts to console him with a wave of his hand. You don’t understand, Charles, he had said, shaking his head in dismay. You couldn’t possibly understand.

  But whatever the case, whether to beg her forgiveness, or for some other reason, the captain had never stopped waiting. He rose each morning because every day could be the day when he might see her again. And he went on eating, breathing, and keeping in shape because it helped him to get up each morning. Charles felt sorry for Shackleton. Here, mechanically wolfing down his revolting puree unfit for a pig, was the greatest hero the world had ever known, the savior of humanity, reduced to a nameless prisoner, hunched and filthy among thousands of others. But no, Shackleton wasn’t like the others. Shackleton clung to his hope. And no one, not even a monster from outer space, could take that away from him.

  “I didn’t see Victoria, either,” the captain blurted out suddenly.

  Charles said nothing. He felt an overwhelming sorrow upon realizing that the captain assumed he was just as anguished not to have received any news of his wife. But it wasn’t true, Charles acknowledged bitterly; he cared no more about Victoria’s fate than his own. Attempting to change the subject, Charles pointed to the purification machine glowing in the distance.

  “If only Mr. Wells could see this,” he said, “I’m sure one glance and he would know exactly what it does.”

  Shackleton made a noise that Charles wasn’t sure whether to interpret as a laugh of approval or a grunt of disapproval.

  It began to rain, one of those strange showers that had become more and more frequent of late. Every two or three days, tiny green crystals would fall from the sky, as though it were raining gemstones. Within seconds the ground was carpeted in a slithery green film, as though the skin of some bizarre insect or reptile had grown over the Earth’s surface. After a while, these bizarre crystals began to melt, giving off poisonous fumes that stained the mist an emerald green, while the greenish liquid they released mixed with the mud to produce a kind of malodorous green moss, from which strange plants grew, spreading over every surface with extraordinary tenaciousness, like some repulsive web. None of the prisoners had ever
seen anything like these vile weeds, which had slowly begun to invade the camp, covering the rocks and trees in a dark green shroud. These putrid plants had also grown up along the borders of the camp, where the crystals created stagnant pools, creeping steadily toward the Earthling trees, adorning them with their sinister drapes, turning them into dark, menacing forests, which in fairy tales lead to witches’ lairs. At first, Charles and Shackleton had spent hours discussing these curious changes to the climate and vegetation: the crystals were simply the colorful culmination of the disturbing coppery hues that so often stained the sky, the sudden tornados that rattled their cells, or the dead birds that had rained from the sky in the first few months, blanketing the fields at dawn. They were convinced this was caused by the pyramids, like the one they were helping to build, which were springing up all over the planet, and they often discussed whether such changes would be reversible when the long-awaited uprising took place and those monstrosities were destroyed along with all the rest. But gradually they had become resigned to the changes, as though things had always been that way, as though from the beginning of time on Earth the skies had always turned the color of rusty copper, and showers of green crystals had always filled the fields. In fact, for months now, they barely spoke about anything much.

  Charles and Shackleton stood up, protecting themselves from the hail of crystals, and joined the group of prisoners whom the Martians had begun assigning their daily tasks. Charles was sent to work on one of the upper levels of the tower. As always, his day was grueling, and yet he was almost glad of all the physical exertion, because besides exhausting him, it also stopped him from thinking. Back in his cell, Charles took out the diary and resumed his story where he had left off.

  DIARY OF CHARLES WINSLOW

  14 February, 1900

  With our plans to bring reinforcements from the future frustrated, Shackleton resumed his pessimistic tune, insisting again and again that he was no hero, that he could do nothing without his weapons and his men, while I reminded him again and again that only moments before he had destroyed one of the tripods single-handed, using only his formidable gifts as a strategist. And besides, why this need to travel to the year 2000? Hadn’t he formed his brave army of the future out of a few exhausted survivors? Then we would do the same: we would comb the ruins and assemble a group of proud, able-bodied men, whom he could mold into the resistance fighters we needed, an elite band of soldiers devoted to the cause. I was convinced that once they knew who Shackleton was, they were sure to follow him, as his warriors of the future had done. After a few long arguments in which I harangued the captain as a general would his troops, I succeeded in coaxing him out of his despair, and he showed some willingness to fight. However, before proceeding with any plan, he insisted on going back to Queen’s Gate to make sure our wives and friends were still safe and sound.

  When I saw how concerned he was for Claire, I understood why great heroes are nearly always loners. Love makes them vulnerable. I knew almost nothing about Captain Shackleton’s private life in the year 2000, only the brief biography Mr. Murray had given the passengers before they climbed aboard the Cronotilus. Yet I thought it likely that in his time, the captain had been a sullen, solitary fellow, whose heart was filled with loathing and the desire to destroy, and who would have forsaken love and a female companion with whom to share the terrible burden of defending the human race. However, the Shackleton before me now, the Shackleton who lived among us, was a man in love and apparently unwilling to put anything before his beloved Claire, even the whole of the human race. Obviously I couldn’t ask him, as I would have liked, if he could damn well forget about his wife for once, much less argue that a hero should be prohibited from falling in love while on duty. And so I agreed to go back to my uncle’s house, but not before convincing him to find some elevated spot with a good view over London, where we could get a clearer idea of the progress and extent of the invasion. This would help us to reach Queen’s Gate without any mishaps and to plan our next moves. We decided to go to Primrose Hill, that natural balcony overlooking the city, where Londoners spent their Sundays, and to this end we crossed the Euston Road. It was the luckiest decision we could have made, for there we bumped into another group of people who had survived that terrible night. What they had endured, together with the view from Primrose Hill of a London brought to its knees, had discouraged them to the point where what they needed most was a hero. And I had brought with me the greatest hero of all.

  The group was made up of the author H. G. Wells and his wife Jane, whom I had had the pleasure of meeting a few years before because of something that has no relevance here, and whom I greeted with genuine affection and pleasure; a beautiful young American woman by the name of Emma Harlow; a young drunkard propped up against a tree, who would later be introduced to us as Inspector Cornelius Clayton of Scotland Yard; and a phantom: Mr. Gilliam Murray. After I had recovered from the shock of discovering he was still alive, I greeted Murray with enthusiasm, which was not entirely due to my admiration for the Master of Time, but also because I was certain this coincidence could only be another sign that we were indeed on our true destined path. Was it not striking that we should by chance bump into the man responsible for Captain Shackleton meeting Claire, and therefore for his presence among us now? However, I should first point out that, as I already mentioned, the group seemed extremely disheartened by the situation, which was understandable, as from the hill we could see that the tripods had overrun the city and were destroying it with the slow tenacity of the termite. The majority of the city’s districts had been reduced to smoldering ruins, and here and there fires had broken out, giving off dense clouds of smoke, while crowds of panic-stricken Londoners attempted, amid a throng of vehicles of all types, to flee the city to the north and east, toward the distant fields, where there apparently were no Martians. And so, with the aim of lifting their spirits, I instantly, and in an admittedly unnecessarily theatrical manner, revealed to them the identity of my mysterious companion. And, as if Shackleton’s credentials did not speak for themselves, I described how I had just seen him annihilate a tripod before my very eyes. Unfortunately, Shackleton’s presence did not hearten them as much as I had expected. When I had finished relating his exploit, Murray looked askance at the captain, but finally stepped toward him, proffering his hand.

  “Pleased to meet you, Captain Shackleton,” he said.

  I watched as they shook hands with grave solemnity for what seemed like an eternity. Unbeknownst to the captain, Gilliam had been spying on him through the keyhole of the future, letting us admire him from afar; consequently, the captain had traveled to a time where everyone knew of his exploits before he had even performed them. The two men could be said to have worked together without ever having met.

  Murray finally released the captain’s hand, much to the relief of the others, and then said, with an exaggerated smile, “What a surprise to find you here. I could never imagine you in our world.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t say the same,” Shackleton replied, in a tone that was surprisingly reserved in contrast, “but I’m sure you’ll understand that it gives me no pleasure to meet the man who turned my duel with Solomon into a circus sideshow for the amusement of bored aristocrats.”

  Murray’s mouth grew taut with displeasure, but with surprising adroitness he resolved it into a smile.

  “Why deprive the English people of such an exciting duel? You’re an extraordinarily accomplished swordsman, Captain. And one could even say I’m your most loyal admirer: I never tired of watching you fight Solomon. I confess that no matter how many times I witnessed your duel, I was always astonished that you defeated such a formidable adversary. If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re a difficult person to kill, Captain . . . it seems you’re protected by mysterious forces.”

  “Perhaps my adversaries aren’t as formidable as you think,” Shackleton retorted coldly.

  “Don’t you think we might leave this vigorous exchange of opinio
ns for another moment, gentlemen?” Wells interposed, gesturing toward the beleaguered city below. “I fear we have more pressing issues to attend to.”

  “You’re quite right, Mr. Wells,” Shackleton hurriedly agreed. “I, at least, have something much more important to do than to argue with Mr. Murray. My wife Claire, the woman for whom I left behind my time, is down there, in Queen’s Gate, and I need to go to her immediately.” He gave the author a meaningful look, which seemed to me disproportionate, and murmured, “She believes in me. And I won’t let her down for anything in the world. Do you understand?”

  “Of course, Captain. We all do,” Wells replied solemnly, taking his own wife’s hand, “and I think I speak for all of us if I suggest we make our way there without delay. However, afterward, things being as they are, I think we ought to leave the city as soon as possible, which is what everyone else appears to be doing. We might, for example, try to reach Folkestone and from there sail to France.”