The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(33)

Strangely moved, they cast an affectionate eye over each toppled edifice, the desolate ruined landscape where a few plumes of black smoke darkened the sky over a London razed to the ground. Neither could contain their tears. In fact, the two men would have stood there forever, weeping over the remains of their beloved city, had it not been for a peculiar clanking sound that came from nearby.

Rifles at the ready again, they followed the clatter until they came to a small mound of rubble. They clambered up it noiselessly, crouching low. Unseen in their improvised lookout, they saw what was causing the racket. It was coming from strange, vaguely humanoid metal creatures. Judging from the vapor seeping out of their joints, they were powered by what looked like tiny steam engines attached to their backs. The loud clanging noise they had heard was the sound of their clumsy iron feet knocking against the metal debris strewn on the ground. The bemused explorers had no idea what these creatures might be, until Austin plucked from the rubble what looked like the scrunched-up page of a newspaper. With trembling fingers, he opened it up and discovered a photograph of the same creatures. The headline announced the unstoppable advance of the automatons, and went on to encourage readers to rally to the support of the human army led by the brave Captain Derek Shackleton. What most surprised them, however, was the date: this loose page was from a newspaper printed April 3, 2000. Kaufman and Austin shook their heads as one, very slowly from left to right. But before they had time to express their amazement in a more sophisticated way, the remains of a rafter in the mound of rubble fell into the street with a loud crash, alerting the automatons. Kaufman and Austin exchanged terrified looks, and took to their heels, running full pelt towards the hole they had come through without looking back.

They easily slipped through it again, but did not stop running until their legs would carry them no further. They erected their tent and cowered inside, trying to collect their thoughts to absorb what they had seen—with the obligatory help of some whiskey, of course. It was clearly time for them to return to the village and report back to London everything they had seen—convinced Gilliam Murray would be able to give them an explanation.

However, their problems did not end there. On the way back to the village, they were attacked by one of the gigantic beasts with spikes on its back, whose potential existence they had forgotten about. They had great difficulty killing it. They used up nearly all their ammunition trying to scare it away, because the bullets kept bouncing off the spiked armor without injuring it in any way. Finally, they managed to chase the creature away by shooting at its eyes, its only weak point as far as they could determine. Having successfully fought off the beast, Kaufman and Austin arrived back at the hole without further incident, and immediately sent a message to London relating all their discoveries.

As soon as he received their news, Gilliam Murray set sail for Africa. He joined the two explorers in the Reed People’s village, where, like doubting Thomas plunging his fingers into Christ’s wounds after he had risen from the dead, he made his way to the razed city of London in the year 2000. He spent many months with the Reed People, although he could not really be sure exactly how many, as he spent extensive periods exploring the pink plain in order to verify the truth of Kaufman and Austin’s claims. Just as they had described in their telegrams, in that sunless world watches stopped ticking, razors became superfluous, and in general, nothing appeared to mark the passage of time. Consequently, he concluded that incredible though it might seem, the moments he spent in there were like a hiatus from his life, a temporary suspension of his inexorable journey towards death. He realized this was not his imagination playing tricks on him when he returned to the village and the puppy he had taken with him ran to join its siblings: they had all come from the same litter but now the others were grown dogs. Gilliam had not needed to take a single shave during his exploration of the plain, but Eternal, the puppy, was a far more spectacular manifestation of the absence of time in the other world. He also deduced that the holes did not lead to other universes as he had first believed, but to different times in a world that was none other than his own. The pink plain was outside the time continuum, outside time, the arena where man’s life took place alongside that of the plants and other animals. And the beings inhabiting that world, Tremanquai’s Reed People, knew how to break out of the time continuum by creating holes in it, openings that enabled man to travel in time, to cross from one era to another. This realization filled Gilliam with excitement and dread. He had made the greatest discovery in the history of mankind: he had discovered what was underneath the world, what was behind reality. He had discovered the fourth dimension.

How strange life was, he thought. He had started out trying to find the source of the Nile and ended up discovering a secret passage that led to the year 2000. But that was how all the greatest discoveries were made. Was the voyage of the Beagle not prompted by spurious financial and strategic interests? The discoveries resulting from it would have been far less interesting had a young naturalist perceptive enough to notice the variations between finches” beaks not been on board. And yet, the story of natural selection would go on to revolutionize the world. His discovery of the fourth dimension had happened in a similarly random way.

But what use was there in discovering something if you could not share it with the rest of the world? Gilliam wanted to take Londoners to the year 2000 so that they could see with their own eyes what the future held for them. The question was, how? He could not possibly take boatloads of city dwellers to a native village in the heart of Africa, where the Reed People were living.