The Map of the Sky

by Félix J Palma

  Later, after the apocalypse had been unleashed on that remote patch of ice, Wells had been incapable of focusing on anything except avoiding at all costs activating the mysterious mechanism lodged in his brain, which threatened to hurl him once more into the abyss of time to God only knew where. Perhaps it was the almost obsessive attention he applied to this that also helped him avoid being overwhelmed by panic. He was able to press his gun against the proud MacReady’s temple, forcing him to do as Reynolds said, and afterward make his way to the armory, navigating the blazing inferno of the ship, as though the devil himself had assured him safe conduct. Once he had tied the sticks of dynamite carefully to the harpoon, he emerged on deck and leapt onto the ice without losing his astonishing composure, not even when he contemplated the final blast that reduced the Annawan to a twisted mass of metal surrounded by mutilated bodies and realized that, regardless of whether or not he succeeded in his mission, his slim hopes of returning to civilization had just been blown to smithereens.

  Imagine him now, facedown on the ice, hidden among the victims of the explosion, dazed and in pain. The blast had deafened him, and the surrounding landscape now seemed shrouded in a primordial silence, the innate silence in which the world had dwelled before humans polluted it with their manmade noises. Slowly, the flames enveloping the remains of the ship began to die down. Wells remembered that in order to end up frozen in the ice, the Envoy must have survived the explosion, and so he carefully surveyed the debris strewn over the snow, until his eyes rested on a mound that was stirring imperceptibly. It was about thirty yards away from where he was, but even at that distance, the moment the figure rose to its feet, Wells could see that it was no human survivor. Flames were clinging to its strange casing, turning it into a kind of living torch, though it did not appear to be in any pain. Afraid the creature might see him, Wells rested his head on the snow and lay motionless, pretending to be dead, as he watched what the creature was doing. To his relief, the hideous insect begin heading in the opposite direction, where Wells could make out two other figures hurriedly standing up from the ice. It looked like Allan and Reynolds, who just then ran over to the dog cages. Wells smiled to himself. As soon as Reynolds unlocked the cage door, a pack of frenzied dogs hurled themselves at the Envoy, who retracted his armor, exposing his sharp talons, and with one fell stroke sliced through the first of the dogs. As soon as the Envoy had finished slashing through the rest of them, he directed himself toward Allan and Reynolds, who had apparently decided there was no point in delaying the inevitable and had given up trying to flee. Coming to a halt five yards from them, the monster let out a roar of triumph. Wells knew he would never have a better opportunity to try to skewer the Envoy with his harpoon. If he did not act now, the Envoy would end up somehow frozen in the ice by Allan and Reynolds, which would not ultimately prevent the invasion, as he well knew. He had to put the Martian out of action for good, not temporarily. That was why he had traveled through time and space.

  Wells leapt resolutely to his feet, firmly grasping the harpoon, and that was when he felt it. He glanced about for a few seconds, slightly dazed, sensing that something was wrong. Everything looked exactly as it had a moment before—the burnt-out ship, the bodies strewn over the snow, the monster about to rip his companions to shreds—and at the same time everything seemed far away. Not the actual distances, which remained the same, but everything else: the pale dawn light was even fainter, the cold was sharper, his clothes were not damp from the snow, and there was no smell of charred wood or corpses, not even of his own sweat. There was a lack of intensity, vividness, color, of whatever it was that made things look alive. It was as if everything had become remote, while remaining exactly where it was. As though he were no longer in that place, but in the memory of that place, in the moment that had already passed. And suddenly, it struck Wells with a painful, unassailable certainty that it was about to happen again, he was about to travel through time. With trembling hands, he hurriedly lit the fuses, praying his body would remain in the present a few moments longer. He did not know how far in advance these symptoms, this subtle fading of reality, announced the actual leap, because he had been unconscious both on the farm and in the sewer basin, but he hoped he at least had enough time to throw the harpoon. He saw the monster’s body tense, preparing to attack. Hang on, Wells told himself, don’t leap through time, damn it, not yet. Taking a run up, he swung his arm back and launched the harpoon at the figure of the Envoy, convinced he would miss, and that he might even hit Allan or Reynolds. To his astonishment, he saw the harpoon plunge into the creature’s back, easily piercing its bony carapace. The Envoy gave a terrible cry and tried hopelessly to pull the harpoon out as it writhed in agony, going through a frenzied series of metamorphoses that revealed to Wells the succession of bodies it had adopted until then. Then, with a muffled blast that sounded as distant to Wells as the mountains on the horizon, the creature was at last blown into a thousand pieces. Unable to get out of the way, Wells was sprayed with green blood and pelted with fragments of flesh and bone, which made him glow faintly as, exhausted, he fell to his knees in the snow. The smoke from the blast dispersed, and he was able to glimpse Reynolds and Allan gazing at him with a mixture of disbelief and gratitude, safe and sound on the ice, though oddly ethereal, as if they had been painted on a sheet lit from behind.

  Realizing he had killed the Envoy, Wells finally gave in to that strange sensation. He had killed the Envoy, he told himself, as the accumulated fatigue and tension gave way to an increasing feeling of vertigo. Suddenly he seemed to become weightless, as though he had been torn out of his body and away from the painful weariness overwhelming him, which seemed to be keeping him in one piece. But this sensation was fleeting, and a moment later, Wells felt himself once more in his body, doubled over by his own weight. Suddenly he vomited, spraying a mouthful of bile over the snow. He coughed once, twice, three times, trying to recover from the dizziness. When his vision grew less blurred, he saw he was still kneeling in the snow, which seemed to have regained its proper consistency and was once again making him cold and wet the way snow always did. But when he could not see Allan or Reynolds in front of him, he realized he was in a different time.

  XL

  AND YET, HOW COULD HE KNOW WHAT YEAR HE was in if he was surrounded by the same endless expanse of snow as before, devoid of any trace of civilization? He could just as well have traveled into the past as into the future, but either way it did not matter very much, he was still facing the same conditions, was just as vulnerable to exposure and exhaustion. When he had recovered from his dizziness, Wells glanced about mournfully and confirmed he was utterly alone: there was no sign of the Annawan, the monster, or his companions. And what did that tell him? Not a great deal, in truth. The ship not being there could mean he was in the past, in a year preceding 1830. Alternatively, it could mean he had traveled sufficiently far into the future for the remains of the Annawan to have disintegrated. Whatever the truth, he was alone in the middle of a patch of ice in the Antarctic, exposed to the harsh elements, without food or equipment, and with no hope of survival. This thought caused him to panic, and for a few moments Wells vented his rage, shouting into the silence. He could not have found a better place: shouting there was like not shouting at all. After a while, slightly calmer, gently cradled by his exhaustion, Wells finally felt ready to accept calmly that he would die there, either from hunger or exposure. In both cases it would be a horrible death. His only consolation was that he had killed the Envoy, though there was no way of knowing whether or not he had also prevented the invasion. He wanted to believe he had, and that the Envoy’s brothers would one day become extinct, slowly poisoned by the Earth’s atmosphere. Yes, he wanted to die believing he had restored peace to his time.

  He began walking for no reason, simply because the cold was much more bearable if he kept moving. He drifted aimlessly, indifferent to where he was going, doubting if he could find his bearings or that there was any point in trying, im
mersed in the depressing gloom of the landscape, each step heavy with despair. Nothing Wells had ever experienced in life had terrified him more than the situation in which he found himself at that moment. For what awaited him was a slow, agonizing, lonely death, probably plagued with hallucinations and delirium, and no one deserved to die like that, forgotten by the world, forgotten by friends. He would die without dignity, alone, as though his death were a depressing ceremony no mourner wanted to attend. He would be the only witness to his own death. He would not even know when he was dying, what date would be carved on his imaginary headstone.

  Then a snowstorm rose, violently whipping at him. Within a few seconds, Wells could scarcely see anything around him. The act of breathing felt like razors ripping through his throat on their way to his lungs. Snow began to settle on his clothes, weighing him down, slowing his unsteady gait, until his exhaustion, and in particular the futility of it all, made him sink once more to his knees. The cold was becoming more and more unbearable, and he knew he was going to die of exposure, to experience in his own body the terrible process of freezing to death. According to what he knew from his studies, tiny crystals would first form in his fingers and toes, where the blood would have difficulty circulating due to the narrowing of his blood vessels, causing unspeakable pain in his limbs, which would gradually stop obeying the commands of his brain. Next would come the arrhythmias, then his entire body would become insensible, to the point where he would urinate and defecate uncontrollably, after which he would suffer successive respiratory arrests that would bring him close to asphyxiation. His epiglottis and larynx would become paralyzed, and finally, after several hours submerged in a cruel numbness, he would lose consciousness and die without even realizing it.

  Horrified by this thought, Wells curled up in the snow, cursing, weeping, laughing, wishing he had never read about what he was now going to experience in his own body. Time went by out of inertia, or perhaps it did not go by at all, for there was nothing to measure its passing, and the cold became so intense that it transcended its own meaning, becoming something else, until Wells no longer knew where the cold ended and he began, because everything was as one. He was the cold, and try as he might, he could not feel the limits of his own body, he could not discover the frontier of flesh that defined him. His numbness was such that he feared he might already have died at some point, without his body having told him.

  Yet he was able to have thoughts: he could evoke Jane’s smile, and so he must still be alive, though it would not be long before he slowly began to die out like a fire that cannot be rekindled. At that moment, he was seized by panic, and somewhere in his mind, which also felt frozen, he became aware of a familiar sensation, a sensation of dizziness that rapidly spread through his head. All of a sudden, the cold that was tormenting him vanished, because all of him vanished. Wells experienced an immense and wonderful feeling of relief, but a moment later, he found himself locked inside himself once more, trapped in the frozen sarcophagus that was his body. Something warm, his semithawed soul perhaps, crept up his throat, and he vomited onto the snow. But the dizziness did not stop. On the contrary, Wells could feel it becoming more intense, and again he felt as though he were being torn from himself, floating through the air, released from all suffering only for the pain and cold to return a moment later.

  Nauseated, Wells vomited onto the snow, two, three, countless times, while part of his brain realized he was traveling back and forth in time, racing blindly through the years, perhaps through the centuries, scattering his errant footsteps throughout eternity. His body yearned to escape death, that terrible, interminable numbness overwhelming him, threatening to freeze his guts. But what was the use of fleeing in time if he was trapped in space, always greeted by the same hostile landscape, this icy vastness intent on becoming his last resting place, at times plunged into darkness, at times barely illuminated by a weak sun shining in the sky like a bead of mercury. He could not escape from a place that seemed older than time itself. After a while, faint from the exertion, Wells noticed that his nausea had finally subsided. A soft light was making the snow sparkle, and the cold was not so biting. The temperature must have been three or four degrees, Wells estimated, and, exhausted as he was, he managed a weak smile of gratitude. For a while, he lay sprawled on the ground, expecting another leap through time, but nothing happened. On the brink of unconsciousness, he wondered whether the strange mechanism in his brain had been driven so hard it had burned out. Just like the Annawan in the ice, his body had finally become trapped in some unknown year, about which all he knew was that it would be the year of his death.

  Then he saw the face of God.

  It was a sallow face, with high cheekbones and almond eyes that radiated an intelligent simplicity. For a moment, they gazed at him fixedly, as though attempting to recognize in him a stray sheep, and, perhaps because he had atoned for his mistake and saved the planet, God decided he should live. He picked him up with his diminutive hands and stretched him out on a sleigh. Wells was conscious of something being laid on top of him, keeping him warm, and then he heard a sharp hissing noise, a kind of crackle, which a few moments later he realized must be the sound of the sledge gliding over the snow. God was taking him somewhere, and after a while, whether days, hours, or centuries he did not know, he heard voices, a swarm of words in varying tones the meaning of which he could not grasp. He felt hands examining him and undressing him, until finally the world stopped spinning and he came to a halt in a warm sense of well-being. And although, immersed in a fog of unconsciousness, Wells had no clear understanding of what was going on, he noticed that the cold had vanished. He was no longer caught in its terrible maw, and gradually he was able to perceive the forgotten contours of his body: he could feel his toes touching what he thought was a blanket, his back lying on something pleasantly silky, his head cushioned in a cocoon of softness. He was once more firmly defined in the world.

  One day, he did not know how long afterward, he awoke in a bunk in a warm, cozy cabin. He was at what appeared to be a whaling station, alive and seemingly in one piece, although his right hand was bandaged. He was unable to tell what year he was in from the furniture or from the clothing worn by those drifting in and out of his cabin, and so, to everyone’s surprise, he announced his emergence from unconsciousness by asking what year it was. He was told it was the year of our Lord 1865. Wells nodded and smiled weakly. He had not fled far. It was possible he had taken bigger leaps while he was dying on the ice, but he had no way of knowing. Now he found himself thirty-five years ahead in time from the day he had harpooned the Envoy’s monstrous body and scarcely a year before the moment when, in a humble, bug-infested dwelling in Bromley, a man identical to him in every respect would be born.

  When, a few days later, the surgeon at the whaling station removed his bandage, he discovered they had amputated his thumb and forefinger, but this seemed a small price to pay for being alive. He lay for at least a week longer in that rustic but comfortable-enough bunk, regaining his strength, silently savoring his remarkable victory over the Envoy, reliving every detail of the infernal expedition up to the final dramatic moments when he was convinced he would fail and everything would be in vain, that he would never be able to accomplish the heroic feat.

  During this time he also remembered reading somewhere, perhaps in one of the many articles about the Baltimore author, that Edgar Allan Poe and the explorer Jeremiah Reynolds were the sole survivors of an extraordinary expedition that had culminated in a mutiny, which until then Wells had never thought to connect with the voyage of the Annawan. Clearly the two men had thought they managed to trap the Envoy permanently in the ice (perhaps by fleeing, after a sudden brainwave, to the stern of the ship where the ice was thinner?) and had somehow managed to return to civilization, where they had decided to lie about what had happened to them at the South Pole. However, now that Wells had seen with his own eyes what really happened, he did not blame them for having lied to the world. Would they have be
en taken for anything but madmen otherwise? Yes, it had been better to invent a mutiny and pray the matter would be forgotten, and that they could carry on their lives where they had left off. Wells did not remember what had become of Reynolds, but Poe had become one of the world’s greatest writers. Wells himself considered Poe one of his favorite authors and had assiduously read all of his works, including The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, that unwholesome tale permeated with a profound horror, the origin of which Wells had now discovered.

  Once he had recovered, Wells set sail for New York and then London, a serene smile on his lips. He would be able to start a new life now, free from guilt. He had earned it. And although he could have settled anywhere in America, he had chosen to go home. He wanted to see London again, to make sure that everything was as it should be, in its proper place. But more than anything, he had to admit, he needed to be close to the Wells who would be born a year later, to see him live from afar, perhaps watch over him. Yes, he wanted to see what the life he could no longer live would be like, for he had to forge another life now, and his missing right thumb and forefinger, which he had once used to hold a pen, intimated to him that he must resign himself to an ordinary life. To being, simply, one among many.

  XLI

  H. G. WELLS ARRIVED IN LONDON A YEAR BEFORE he was born.

  During the long voyage, contemplating the vast, shimmering ocean from the ship’s deck, Wells had had more than enough time to make plans: he would start a new life under the name Griffin; he might even let his hair and beard grow so that no one could recognize him—though there might be no need for that, for by the time the real Wells (why could he not help referring to him as the genuine one?) reached his age, he would be a venerable old man whose wrinkled face would be disguise enough. There were other, more important considerations, he told himself. Where would he settle in order to begin this new life, for example? After weighing up the various options, he decided on Weybridge, partly because it was one of the towns around London that had most suffered during the Martian invasion, but also because it was the same distance from the capital as it was from Woking and Worcester Park, where the other Wells would settle. Because he was clear about one thing: he had no choice but to start a new life, even though it would be little more than a mere existence, because he would never consider it his own life. His true life, with its satisfactions and miseries, would be lived by the other Wells, and only by remaining as close to him as possible, by becoming a witness to the most significant events in the life of his double—those he had already experienced and those he would never experience—could he manage to endure life. He applied himself to this as best he could: he settled in Weybridge, took employment at a chemist, and let each day run uneventfully into the next, like a stream into which he had no interest in casting his line.