The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(8)
“Come and sit next to me,” Charles had said to him one afternoon on the riverbank, “and try to imagine a perfectly useless object.”
“A perfectly useless object,” Wells had repeated, sitting down with his back against the tree. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know how. Besides, what would be the use?”
“Oh, it’s more useful than you think.” Charles grinned and, seeing that his pupil was still puzzled, added, “I have something here that might help you.”
He produced from his jacket pocket an ornate porcelain pillbox. He opened the lid by pressing a spring, the same as a pocket watch, revealing a tiny mound of golden powder. Wells raised his eyebrows.
“Is it . . . fairy dust?”
To Wells’s astonishment, Charles nodded. It would never have entered Wells’s head that his professor might take such a substance. It had been banned by the Church for more than a decade, because they thought it stimulated the brain in a negative way, inciting people to imagine unproductive things.
“Take some, and then try doing what I said,” Charles exhorted, taking a pinch himself and raising it to his nostril. Then he offered the box to Wells, who hesitated.
“Oh, go on, George, be a devil. Why do you suppose humans have noses, to smell the lilies of the field?”
At last Wells took a pinch of the fairy dust and snuffed it into his nose as his professor smiled at him approvingly. Once the ritual had been consummated, Charles put the pillbox away, leaned back against the tree, and slowly closed his eyes.
“Now let your mind drift, George,” Charles ordered in an excited whisper. “Find out how far you are able to go.”
Amused, Wells grinned and leaned back as well, closing his eyes. For a few moments, he tried to do what Charles had said and imagine a perfectly useless object, but he couldn’t stop his mind from reflecting about whether it was possible to diagnose a person’s illness by analyzing his breath, as was done with blood or urine. It was something he had been speculating about for days. Vaguely disappointed, he thought of remarking to his professor that the fairy dust hadn’t worked on him, but he decided to sit still with his eyes closed and wait for Charles to stir. He didn’t want to interrupt him in case the professor was making his mind fly the way children flew kites. Wells concentrated on enjoying the delicious cool breeze riffling the water, amusing himself by trying to discover a break in the constant buzz of insects in his ears, and presently he started to feel drowsy. In his sluggish state, he noticed his mind begin to reel, and his thoughts rolled around in his head as they slowly began to lose all logic. He was momentarily seized with panic as he realized that each idea he formed instantly floated away, like a ship adrift, but he managed to calm down, telling himself that nothing bad was happening to his brain, that his altered state was an effect of the fairy dust, and he abandoned himself to it with a sense of curiosity rather than fear. A flood of nonsensical images, as impossible as they were suggestive, began filling his head, swirling and intermingling to create outlandish configurations. He saw Martian airships flying toward Earth, invisible men, and strange creatures, half pig, half hyena. And he felt a stab of excitement. This was like riding a wild horse bareback. Mesmerized, he let the feeling intensify to see if he might not be able to ride a dragon, too. Wells had no idea how long he remained in that state, creating and demolishing stories, with only the logic of delirium as his guide. He assumed Charles was doing the same at his side, but when it began to grow cold and he opened his eyes, he discovered his professor gazing at him with a wry smile.
“What you’ve been doing is imagining, my dear George, and although there are many who believe it has no use, I can assure you it does. We are what we imagine,” he declared, rephrasing the old motto. “You’ll find out for yourself soon enough.”
And so he had. That very night, while Jane was asleep, Wells had shut himself in his study and donned his writing glove. Only this time not with the intention of penning any essays or articles that might help advance mankind’s understanding of the world. This time he was going to write down the tales inspired by the images he had glimpsed under the influence of the fairy dust. He took a deep breath and tried to conjure them, but it was as though his mind, having reverted to its natural state of rigidity, refused all attempts. After hours spent trying to regurgitate them, he gave up and went outside onto the patio. The night sky was swarming with dirigibles, but Wells had no difficulty making out the Albatross, the airship bristling with propellers commissioned from Verne Industries by one of the richest men on the planet: Gilliam Murray, known as the Master of Imagination, because, while his business card described him as an antiques dealer, everyone knew he was involved in the manufacture and sale of fairy dust. That rotund braggart controlled his increasingly vast empire from his flying fortress, without the ecclesiastical police ever having succeeded in infiltrating his impenetrable web of bribery, threats, and extortion. And so, immune to the world’s highest authority, the omnipresent Albatross cast a tainted shadow over the London evenings, reminding men that if they wished to explore the limits of their imagination, all they needed to do was take a pinch of Gilliam Murray’s golden dust.
Wells had never imagined he would one day go in search of the substance manufactured by that despicable individual, and yet, not without a sense of shame, this was precisely what he found himself doing the following day. Not wishing to importune his professor, he made his way to Limehouse, an area of the city inhabited by so-called Ignorants, those who had decided to turn their backs on Knowledge. Wells had been told it was easy to get the dust there, and he was not mistaken: he came away with a full pillbox. During the night, he locked himself in his study, snuffed a pinch of the powder, put on his writing glove, and waited. His mind soon began to reel, as it had on that golden afternoon he had spent with Charles. Three hours later, with only a vague memory of his fingers flickering incessantly over the paper, Wells discovered that he had managed to fashion a story. He repeated the ritual the following night, and the night after, and so on, until he had a pile of stories invented on a playful whim. He had no idea why he wrote them, only to let them molder in his desk drawer because he dared not show them to anyone, not even to Jane. He didn’t consider them worthy examples of a craft capable of producing useful insights. The protagonists of his tales were scientists caught up in strange, unwholesome experiments that contributed nothing to society, ambitious men who used science for their own ends, who sought invisibility or turned animals into humans, and he doubted the Church would give them its blessing. Perhaps that was why he enjoyed writing them.