The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(2)
A red carpet had been rolled out in front of the palace doors, and on either side a noisy crowd was brandishing every sort of placard while a dozen bobbies tried to contain their fervor. Since its construction, the cathedralesque building had been the stage of great symposia regarding the dimensions of the universe, the origins of time, or the existence of the super-atom, all legendary debates whose most memorable phrases and parries had passed into common usage. The ornithopter circled the palace towers, hovering for a moment before alighting on a clear area of street cordoned off for that purpose. The cleaner-spiders had made the windows gleam, and the mechanical pelicans had devoured the garbage in the gutters, leaving that part of the city spotless and crying out to be sullied anew. When the ornithopter had finally landed, a liveried automaton went to hold open the door for its occupants. Before stepping out, Wells glanced at Jane with a look of combined resolve and fear; she responded with a reassuring smile. The crowd burst into a unanimous roar of jubilation as he emerged from the vehicle. Wells could hear shouts of encouragement mixed with the booing of his rival’s supporters. With Jane on his arm, he crossed the gauntlet that was the red carpet, following the automaton and waving to the public as he tried hard to project the serenity of one who considers himself far superior to his opponent.
They walked through the portal, which bore an inscription in huge bronze lettering: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Once inside, the automaton led them along a narrow corridor to a dressing room and then offered to take Jane to the VIP box. It was time for them to part. Jane went over to Wells and straightened his tie.
“Don’t worry, Bertie. You’re going to be fine.”
“Thank you, my dear,” he mumbled.
They closed their eyes and gently joined foreheads for a few seconds, each honoring the other’s mind. After that intimate gesture, with which couples conveyed how necessary and enlightening the other’s company was for them in their collective journey toward Knowledge, Jane looked straight at her husband.
“Best of luck, my dear,” she told him before declaring: “Chaos is inevitable.”
“Chaos is inevitable,” Wells repeated diligently.
He wished he could leave his wife with the slogan used in his parents’ day: “We are what we know,” which so faithfully summed up the aspirations of their generation. However, since the discovery of the dreadful fate that awaited the universe, the Church had imposed this new slogan to raise awareness that the end was nigh.
After saying good-bye, Jane followed the automaton to the VIP box. As Wells watched her walk away, he admired yet again the miraculous sequence of genes that had created this woman, slender and lovely as a Dresden figurine, a sequence he had been unable to resist secretly unraveling in his laboratory, despite feeling that there was something oddly obscene about reducing his wife to an abstract jumble of facts and formulas. Before she disappeared at the end of the corridor, Jane gave him a final smile of encouragement, and the biologist experienced a sudden desire to kiss his wife’s lips. He instantly chastised himself. A kiss? What was he thinking? That gesture had long been obsolete, ever since the Church of Knowledge deemed it unproductive and subversive. Gloomily, he resolved to examine his response at length once the debate was over. The Church encouraged people from an early age to analyze everything, including their feelings, to map out their inner selves and learn to repress any emotion that wasn’t useful or easily controlled. It wasn’t that love, or passion, or friendship was forbidden. Love of books or a passion for research was heartily approved of, provided the mind was in charge. But love between two people could take place only under strict surveillance. It was possible to abandon oneself freely to love (indeed, the Church encouraged young people to mate in order to perpetuate the species), but it was also necessary to spend time analyzing love, examining its hidden motives, drawing diagrams of it and comparing them with those of a partner, presenting regular reports on love’s origin, evolution, and inconsistencies to the local parish priest, who would help scrutinize those treacherous emotions until they could be understood, for understanding was what made it possible to control everything. And yet, none of those emotions survived such scrutiny. The more you understood them, the fainter they became, like a dream fading as you try to recall it.
Wells couldn’t help admiring the Church of Knowledge’s ingenious solution to this thorny issue. By insisting love be understood, it had created the perfect vaccine against love. Prohibiting love would have elevated it, made it more desirable, capable of fomenting uprisings, wars, and acts of revenge. In short, it would have brought about another Dark Era, which would only have stood in the way of progress. And what would have become of them then? Would they have gotten that far had they allowed their feelings to govern them? Would they have amassed all that Knowledge, which as things stood might prove their only route to salvation? Wells didn’t think so. He was convinced that the key to the survival of the species lay in the judicious act of bridling mankind’s emotional impulses, unshackling humans from their feelings just as thousands of years before they had been freed from their instincts. Yet there were times, when he watched Jane sleeping, that he couldn’t stop himself from having doubts. Contemplating the placid abandon of her lovely face, the extreme fragility of her body momentarily deprived of the admirable personality that infused it with life, he would wonder whether the path to salvation and the path to happiness were one and the same.