The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(128)

“Good grief! If the Church knew that Charles had spent years waiting for that little girl to grow up just so that he could marry her, it must have been terribly difficult to persuade the vicar that such an excessive love wouldn’t cause him to stray from the path towards Knowl—”

A timid cough made them look up. They had been so absorbed in their tête-à-tête that they hadn’t heard Dodgson come in. He was standing beside the table, holding the tea tray, and the expression on his face left them in no doubt that he had heard the end of their conversation.

“We English always manage to turn up in time for tea, even when traveling between universes,” Wells tried to jest.

But that didn’t distract the young Dodgson, who murmured, his cheeks turning bright pink, “In your world, my twin married his Alice . . .” He placed the tea tray abruptly on the table and sat down as if he felt suddenly dizzy. He took several minutes to compose himself before asking, “Tell me, w-what was Alice like as a grown-up? What sort of w-woman did she turn into?”

“This time you sat down in the chair on the left . . . ,” Wells ventured.

“Why didn’t you sit on the same chair as before?” Jane asked.

“Well . . . I c-can change seats if you like,” Dodgson said solicitously, moving to the other chair with unexpected alacrity. “Very well,” he proposed, once he was ensconced, “now, t-tell me your story, and that of the o-other Charles . . .”

“Of course, of course . . . Now, in our world—” Wells began, but instantly broke off. “Forgive me, Charles, but did you actually change seats, or did you only have the intention of doing so?”

“For heaven’s sake!” the young man exclaimed. “What is your problem with the chairs? You appear to have a peculiar obsession with randomness . . .”

The couple looked at him in astonishment.

“What problem could we possibly have with a concept that is so completely theoretical and unreal?” Wells asked.

Now it was Dodgson’s turn in that improvised contest of flabbergasted expressions, and I must say he came out of it rather well.

“Do you m-mean that e-everything in your w-world is predetermined?”

“Predetermined? What the deuce does that mean?” Wells replied crossly. “In our world things simply happen the only way they can happen. It would never have occurred to me that it could be any other way . . . And yet, objects in this world have the tiresome habit of never staying still . . . It is like wanting to take something off a shelf only to find that it has moved to another shelf out of reach . . . And every decision is so . . .”

“So impossible, so uncertain . . . ,” murmured Jane.

“It is a peculiar and frustrating sensation . . . ,” Wells added, genuinely despondent.

“So we c-could say that everything is impocertain and at the s-same time pecuriating.” Dodgson smiled with a dreamy air.

The couple gaped at him while Dodgson gazed back at them, apparently lost in thought.

“I have an idea,” he said at last, with sudden excitement, or rather with sudditement. “Each time you have a d-doubt about which ch-chair I am sitting on, why don’t you shout ‘Change seats!’ and the three of us will move up one, do you agree? I imagine that this circular movement might ease your anxiety, at least long enough for us to carry on a quiet conversation . . .”

Wells and Jane exchanged looks and cried, “Change seats!”

“Oh . . . v-very well.” And all three of them stood up and moved to the chair on their right. Then, smiling politely, Dodgson said, “Good, now that we are all in our proper places . . . for the time being, George, Catherine, would you kindly tell me all those incredible things I have to believe in before breakfast tomorrow, assuming there are more to tell?”

And this was how the mad tea party that would mark the beginning of their friendship commenced. Had anyone been spying on them through the window, he would have never suspected that, although what he was seeing looked very like a game for children without any children, a miracle was taking place in that room, because amid the heated debates, theorizing, and hypothesizing, as the teacups piled up on the table, three exceptional minds had begun to stumble upon what until then no one else had ever grasped: the true nature of the universe.





24


DURING THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Wells and Jane were heartened to be able to count on Dodgson in what they would soon consider to be the greatest adventure of their lives. They couldn’t imagine what would have become of them had they been set adrift in that universe so similar and yet so different from their own without the help of the young mathematician, who was not only good at resolving practical problems, such as finding a way of earning a living or inventing an identity with which to be able to integrate into society, but also at other equally important things, such as staying sane. It was clear that only someone like Dodgson could have accepted their unbelievable tale almost without turning a hair, for the young professor saw the world through a child’s eyes, and, as everyone knows, children respond perfectly to nonsense: only they allow strange things to remain strange, refusing to apply to them the rules of any rational system. And it was thanks to this method that Wells, Jane, and Dodgson discovered many answers to their questions.

The most important answer of all they arrived at that first evening when, after much speculation veering inevitably between clearheadedness and nonsensicality, they succeeded in establishing the main difference between their two universes, which would be the basis for all their future deliberations. Dodgson, inspired by his keen love of the theater, stumbled on the metaphor that would be the origin of what they later referred to as the Theory of Theaters. And the main difference had to be connected to the Wellses’ obsession with randomness. After considering the matter in great depth, the three of them concluded that the only way to determine whether an event occurred one way and not another was through observation. That way, the infinite possibilities of how an event occurred condensed into a single truth: that witnessed by the observer. Thus, the Wellses’ universe resembled a theater where life’s drama was being played out before an audience, and their intense observation precluded any other possible version of the play, so that only the performance they were watching existed with absolute certainty. That would explain why randomness did not exist in that distant universe.