The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(146)

IN THE PRISON CAMP THE FOLLOWING DAY, Charles at last spotted Shackleton at breakfast. He glimpsed him in the distance, sitting on a rock eating his puree. As he had anticipated, the captain had returned from the breeding camp wearing the same gloomy expression he had probably left with. And this could only mean one thing. Charles approached, greeting him with a worried look, and sat down beside him, swamped by the enormous overcoat he had been given when the last lot of clothing had been doled out. Judging by the second-rate workmanship and rough material, the item had probably belonged to a tradesman, not that Charles hadn’t long since ceased caring about something as insignificant as wearing the clothes of a lowly commoner. He gazed silently at Shackleton, hoping his friend would feel the need to speak to him.

Once a week, the Martians would march a handful of the healthiest-looking male specimens to a nearby camp where they kept the youngest, most fertile women. Every member of this procession was forced to couple with one of the women, under the watchful eye of the Martians, and was then brought back, without knowing whether his seed had taken root. This way the Martians were sure to have a plentiful supply of slaves to carry out the arduous task of conditioning the planet. During the first few months of his internment, when he still looked like a specimen worth perpetuating, Charles had been regularly chosen, but hard labor and malnutrition had ruined his looks to the point where no Martian deemed his seed could produce anything satisfactory. Shackleton, on the other hand, was chosen almost every week, because the captain had contrived to keep his robust shape by eating everything he could lay his hands on (more than once Charles had surprised him scraping the bowls in the pile) and even exercising at night alone in his cell. At first, Charles hadn’t been able to comprehend Shackleton’s dogged refusal to waste away, to let his body become a dried-up husk like his own. Later he understood his reasoning: if Shackleton stayed in shape, he was more likely to be taken to the women’s camp, and consequently more likely to be able to find Claire, whom he had not laid eyes on since the day Charles persuaded him to leave the basement of the house in Queen’s Gate to fulfill a destiny that was subsequently shown to be mistaken.

They sat facing each other, eating their breakfast in silence. Charles knew without having to ask that the captain had not spotted Claire among the other women this time either. And as always, he felt guilty for having made Shackleton leave his uncle’s basement. Charles had had plenty of time over the past few years to regret many things he had done in his life, but there was nothing he regretted so much as having separated Derek from his wife. In the first few months of their captivity, the captain had nurtured exaggerated hopes of an uprising. But those were the early days, when Shackleton still believed his wife was safe in the basement at Queen’s Gate, and he could think of nothing else but returning to her side, the days when he was still incapable of imagining how the invasion would turn out, much less envisaging life without the woman for whom he had traveled back in time. However, thanks to Charles’s disastrous intervention, that is what had happened, and during the first few months in the prison camp, Shackleton had spent all his time thinking up ways of escaping in order to find Claire. He had elaborated plan after plan, which would have raised Charles’s hopes, too, had not each of his ideas appeared wilder and more desperate than the one before: he wanted to sew all the bedsheets in the camp together and leap from the top of the pyramid and glide through the air; he wanted to escape through the funnel, to organize an uprising in the women’s camp. These madcap escape plans, which he would convey in a garbled fashion to a few randomly chosen prisoners, only showed how much he longed to find Claire. He devoted all his thoughts, all his energy to that. And when Charles protested that she could be anywhere (he never had the heart to suggest she might be dead), that she might have left England, the captain always replied that he had traveled even farther the first time to be with her.

Gradually he had begun to speak less and less about his harebrained schemes. Shackleton’s hopes of escape, of forming a resistance group out of the ravaged prisoners, of attacking camp after camp, of visiting every destroyed city in which groups of fugitives were hiding out, of crossing the whole planet if necessary to find his wife were reduced to weary comments, spoken without conviction, which petered out as the months went by. Never again did Shackleton mention the word “escape.” All he did now was await the new batches of females with which they replenished the women’s prison camps, clinging to the hope that one day he would recognize Claire among the women filling the breeding pavilions, whose pointed rooftops could be seen on sunny days glittering in the distance like a sea of bristles. But why? Charles thought; what was the point of finding her in this situation, in these dark days where they could have no hope, only the pain of knowing they were still alive and suffering?

One day, also during breakfast, the captain’s irrepressible, absurd optimism had brought out the old cynic in Charles. He had immediately asked Shackleton cruelly, And what would you say to her, Derek, if you did eventually find her? The captain had looked at him in surprise, remaining silent for a long time, before dredging up a reply from the deep well of sorrow that was his soul: I would beg her forgiveness, he had said. I would say to her: forgive me for having lied to you, Claire. When Charles heard this he had tried to cheer Shackleton up, insisting that Claire could not possibly blame him for having wanted to stop the invasion. On the contrary, Charles had said, she would be proud of you for trying, for keeping the promise you made to her in the basement at Queen’s Gate, and . . . But the captain had dismissed Charles’s clumsy attempts to console him with a wave of his hand. You don’t understand, Charles, he had said, shaking his head in dismay. You couldn’t possibly understand.