The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(164)
Murray.
And so, since an almost infinite number of different worlds existed, Wells reflected, everything that could happen, did happen.
Or, what amounted to the same thing: any world, civilization, creature it was possible to imagine already existed. And so, for example, there was a world dominated by a nonmammalian species, another by birdmen living in huge nests, another in which man used an alphabet to count the fingers on his hand, another in which sleep erased all memory and each day was a new life, another in which a detective called Sherlock Holmes really did exist, and his companion was a clever little rascal called Oliver Twist, and still another in which an inventor had built a time machine and discovered a nightmarish paradise in the year 802,701.
And taking this to its limit, there was also somewhere a universe governed by laws different from those Newton had established, where there were fairies and unicorns and talking mermaids and plants, for in a universe where anything was possible, children’s stories were no longer inventions, but copies of worlds their authors, by some quirk of fate, had been able to glimpse.
“Did no one invent anything, then? Was everyone merely copying?” Wells wondered. The writer pondered over the question for a while, and given it is becoming clear this particular tale is drawing to a close, I shall use the time to bid you farewell, like an actor waving good-bye to his audience from the stage. Thank you very much for your attention, and I sincerely hope that you enjoyed the show … But now let us return to Wells, who recovered with a start owing to an almost metaphysical shudder running down his spine, because his wandering thoughts had led him to pose another question: What if his life were being written by someone in another reality, for instance in the universe almost exactly like his own in which there was no Time Travel company and Gilliam Murray was the author of dreadful little novels? He gave serious thought to the possibility of someone copying his life and pretending it was fiction. But why would anyone bother? He was not material for a novel. Had he been shipwrecked on a tropical island, like Robinson Crusoe, he would have been incapable of even making a clay gourd. By the same token, his life was too dull for anyone to transform it into an exciting story. Although undeniably the past few weeks had been rather eventful: in a matter of a few days, he had saved Andrew Harrington’s and Claire Haggerty’s lives by using his imagination, as Jane had taken care to point out in a somewhat dramatic manner, as though she had been addressing a packed audience he could not see in the stalls.
In the first case, he had been forced to pretend he possessed a time machine like the one in his novel, and in the second that he was a hero from the future who wrote love letters. Was there material for a novel in any of this? Possibly. A novel narrating the creation of a company called Murray’s Time Travel, in which he, unfortunately, had played a part, a novel that surprised its readers towards the middle when it was revealed that the year 2000 was no more than a stage set built with rubble from a demolition (although this, of course, would only be a revelation to readers from Wells’s own time). If such a novel survived the passage of time, and was read by people living after the year 2000 there would be nothing to reveal, for reality itself would have given the lie to the future described in the story. But did that mean it was impossible to write a novel set in Wells’s time speculating about a future that was already the author’s past? The thought saddened him. He preferred to believe his readers would understand they were meant to read the novel as if they were in 1896, as if they, in fact, had experienced a journey through time. Still, since he did not have the makings of a hero, he would have to be a secondary character in the novel, someone to whom others, the story’s true protagonists, came to for help.
If someone in a neighboring universe had decided to write about his life, in whatever time, he hoped for their sake that this was the last page, as he very much doubted his life would carry on in the same vein. He had probably exhausted his quota of excitement in the past two weeks, and from this point on his life would carry on once more in peaceable monotony, like that of any other writer.
He gazed at Andrew Harrington, the character with whom he would have started this hypothetical novel, and, as he saw him walk away bathed in the golden glow of dawn, perhaps with a euphoric smile playing about his lips, he told himself that this was the perfect image with which to end the tale. He wondered, as if somehow he were able to see or hear me, whether at that very moment someone was not doing precisely that, and then experiencing the rush of joy every writer feels when finishing a novel, a happiness nothing else in life can bring, not sipping Scotch whiskey in the bathtub until the water goes cold, nor caressing a woman’s body, not the touch on the skin of the delicious breeze heralding the arrival of summer.