The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(148)
However, after two weeks traipsing round London, knocking on every publisher’s door, they were forced to admit defeat. Regardless of whether it contained the key to saving the world, no one wanted to publish a complicated mathematical treatise entitled The Map of Chaos that was impossible to make head or tail of. Wells had to be satisfied to have his rejected manuscript bound in fine leather with the silver Star of Chaos embossed on its cover. He had devoted a year of his life to the absurd task of writing an indecipherable book, a map that would only make sense if a pair of inhuman eyes alighted on its pages, which seemed most unlikely.
Back home, they placed the one existing copy of The Map of Chaos on the table and sat down in their armchairs to try to think up some other way of making sure it reached an Executioner. But the problem seemed insoluble.
“Maybe we should turn the search on its head,” Jane suggested after a few moments’ reflection.
“What do you mean?” asked Wells.
“Instead of trying to find an Executioner in order to give him the book, we should let them come to us. We could find a twin who has become a Destructor and give him the book.”
Wells looked at her in astonishment.
“You mean . . . entrust our mission to them?”
Jane nodded, although she didn’t seem all that convinced either.
“Yes, I suppose we could . . . ,” Wells mused. “But it would have to be a cronotemic who is active enough to attract the Executioners but whose mental and molecular decline hasn’t set in and who is young and healthy enough to pass the mission on to another twin when the initial symptoms of degeneration start. In short: we would have to find the Perfect Twin. He or she would be the only one to whom we could safely entrust the book.”
They both agreed they needed to find the Perfect Twin, but how? They could look for as many as they wanted without moving from their chairs, but that would be of no use. They had no way of communicating with them, and if they accidentally jumped into their world, they would lose all trace of them immediately, because they were incapable of infiltrating the mind of any double occupying the same stage as they. That would mean searching all over London, as they doubted the poor wretch would stay put wherever they appeared, waiting for them to turn up. And that was assuming they arrived at the same place they had left from, for there was always the possibility they might be sucked up by a Maelstrom Coordinate and spat out in the Himalayas or the Sahara Desert or some other equally remote corner of the universe . . . It was then that the Supreme Knowledge illuminated their minds as one.
“The Maelstrom Coordinates!” they exclaimed.
Why hadn’t they thought of it before? There was no need for them to tramp blindly around the city. They only had to wait beside one of those whirlpools for a cronotemic twin to land in their world and hope that he or she was the Perfect Twin. Then they would hand him or her the book, explaining that it contained the key to saving the universe. They trusted they could convince him or her without too much difficulty. After all, they should know their own doubles better than they knew anyone. It would be like convincing themselves, or so they hoped. But they would worry about that later. First of all they had to find a Perfect Twin.
“I’m afraid, my dear, that we will have to become devotees of spiritualism,” said Wells.
They both smiled at that, remembering how they had pitied people who went to séances to communicate with their dead relatives.
Throughout the following year, Wells and Jane visited every medium practicing in England at the time, as well as with any who included the British Isles in their European tours. They attended séances conducted by C. H. Foster, Madame d’Esperance, William Eglinton, and the Reverend Stainton Moses, to name but a few. In rooms plunged into a reddish gloom, they sat around tables touching fingers with those next to them while the medium of the day levitated above their heads, held up by wires concealed beneath his or her tunic or conjured some ectoplasmic materialization made from a painted chiffon veil. They also visited several supposedly haunted houses in England. But the results of their exhaustive search were less than encouraging. Among all those charlatans it was hard to discover a genuine medium who also contained a Maelstrom Coordinate, and on the rare occasions that they did, none of the cronotemics that emerged from their bodies were the Wellses’ twins, but instead some half-translucent wretches whose minds had gone and who simply recited pathetically whatever the medium had told them. Only once they thought they recognized a boy of six or seven who materialized in the middle of a séance looking sadly neglected and grubby, like an Oliver Twist of the multiverse, and crying out that he wanted his mummy. At Borley Rectory they also found a demented eighty-year-old twin of Jane’s whose appearances were responsible for the rector’s daughters’ claims that the house was haunted. Those futile encounters were all they had managed to achieve with their desperate plan.
And so it was no wonder that, as the months went by, each became secretly convinced that this strategy wasn’t going to work either. However, neither of them dared to put it into words, so as not to demoralize the other completely. But then, one afternoon, events took over. They were on their way home after attending a séance conducted by a medium who had turned out to be a fake, and as they walked Wells railed continuously against that bunch of charlatans who used their cheap tricks to take advantage of other people’s unhappiness.
“They are wasting our precious time!” he fumed. “Not to mention our money!”