The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(157)

Perhaps you would have preferred it if I had not written you any letter. Perhaps you would have liked it better if I had let you meet your fate unprepared. After all, what awaits you is not all that bad and even contains moments of happiness, as you have seen. But if I wrote to you, it is because somehow I feel this is not the life you should live.

Indeed, perhaps you should stay in the past, living happily with Jane and turning me into a successful writer who knows nothing about journeys through time, not real ones anyway. For me it is too late, of course; I cannot choose a different life, but you can. You can still choose between your life and the life I have just recounted to you, between going on being Bertie or becoming me. In the end, that is what time travel gives us, a second chance, the opportunity go back and do things differently.

I have given a great deal of thought to what might happen if you decide not to go to the meeting with Marcus tomorrow. If you do not go, no one will point a gun at you, your brain will not be activated, and you will not travel through time, and therefore you will neither bring about the Ripper’s capture, nor will you meet Alice, nor flee the German bombardment, nor rescue any woman at Olsen’s department store. And without you, the mutant gene will not be created, and so there will be no time travelers and no Marcus to travel into the past to kill you, and I imagine everything that happened from the moment he murdered the tramp in Marylebone will disappear from the time continuum as though a huge broom had swept it away. All the colored strings dangling from the white cord of the map of time would vanish, for no one would have created any parallel universe where Jack the Ripper had been caught, or where her gracious Majesty went around with a squirrel monkey on her shoulder. Good God, the map of time itself would disappear! Who would be there to create it? As you can see, Bertie, if you decide not to go, you will annihilate an entire world. But do not let this put you off.

The only thing that would remain unchanged would be her appearance at Olsen’s department store in 1984, although no one will take her by the hand and lead her away to a beautiful Georgian house where she will live happily ever after.

And what would happen to you? I imagine you would go back to the moment just before your life was altered by your own time traveling. Before Murray’s thug chloroforms you? Almost certainly, because if Marcus never traveled to your time and did not kill anyone, Garrett would never suspect Shackleton, and Gilliam would not send his thug to abduct you so that you that you could save his bacon, and therefore no chloroform-soaked handkerchief would be placed over you face on the night of November 20, 1896. Be that as it may, however far back you go, I do not imagine you will experience any of the physical effects of time travel: you will simply disappear from one place and reappear in another as if by magic, without being aware of any transition, although of course you will remember nothing of what you experienced after that moment. You would not know that you had traveled in time or that parallel universes exist.

If you decide to change what happened, this is what will occur, I fear: you will know nothing of me. It would be like reversing the moves in a game of chess until you find the one that began the checkmate. At that point, if instead of the bishop you ought to move, you decide to use your rook, the game will take a different turn, just as your life will tomorrow if you do not go to the meeting.

And so everything depends on you, Bertie. Bishop or rook. Your life or mine. Do what you believe you have to do.

Yours ever, Herbert George Wells.





41


“And what about predestination?” Wells wondered. Perhaps he was fated to travel in time, first to 1888, then to the beginning of that atrocious war that would involve the entire planet, and so on, exactly as he had told himself in the letter. Perhaps he was fated to produce the first race of time travelers. Perhaps he had no right to change the future, to prevent man from being able one day to travel in time because he refused to sacrifice his own life, because he wanted to stay with Jane in the past it had taken him so long to arrange to his liking. For wanting to go on being Bertie.

However, this was not only a consideration about the morality of his choice, but about whether he really had a choice. Wells doubted he could solve the problem simply by not turning up at the meeting, as his future self had suggested. He was certain that if he did not go, sooner or later Marcus would find him and kill him in any case. In the end, he was sure that what he was about to do was his only choice, he said to himself, clutching the manuscript of The Invisible Man, as the cab skirted Green Park on its way to Berkeley Square, where the man who intended to kill him was waiting.

After he had finished reading the letter, he had put it back in the envelope and sat for a long time in his armchair. He had been irritated by the tone of mocking condescension the future Wells had used to address him, although he could hardly reproach him for it, given that the author of the letter was he himself. Besides, he had to recognize that if he had been in the future Wells’s shoes, considering all he had gone through, he would have found it difficult to avoid that patronizing tone towards his callow past self, someone who had scarcely taken his first steps in the world. But all that was immaterial. What he needed to do was assimilate as quickly as possible the astonishing fact that he himself was the author of that letter, in order to focus on the really important question: what he should to do about it? He wanted his decision to take into account what he thought was the almost metaphysical principle of the matter. Which of the two lives branching off beneath him was the one he really ought to live? Which path should he venture down? Was there any way of knowing? No, there was not. Besides, according to the theory of multiple worlds, changes to the past did not affect the present, but created an alternative present, a new universe that ran alongside the original, which remained intact. Accordingly, the beautiful messenger who had crossed time to give him the letter had crossed into a parallel universe, because in the real world no one had walked up to him outside his house. Consequently, even if he did not go to the meeting, in the world in which he did not receive the letter he would. His other life, then, the one in which the jocular future Wells had lived, would not disappear. It was redundant, therefore, to regard the act of not bowing to fate as some sort of miscarriage of time.