The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(174)
Charles searched hard for an answer amid the increasingly murky shadows filling his mind, but his thoughts became tangled, forming a confused mass: the future—which he had seen, and which could thus be considered the past—and the present, in which he lived, had lost their natural order and been rearranged in a way that seemed odd, though the fact was he couldn’t be sure of that either. Could the captain, who was meant to defeat Solomon, die inside the pyramid without the order of the universe being destroyed? Too confused, Charles resolved to remain silent, for fear of spoiling everything. The captain had to carry on hoping he would find Claire one day, he had to fight, driven on by this hope. Yes, he had to save the Earth and safeguard the future, the future where he would, once more, meet Claire for the first time, and from whence he would travel to be with her, to fall in love with her over and over again, to lose her over and over again, and to search for her forever, and no one must ever take away his hope of finding her, for the human race needed him to be lonely and sad, forever dreaming he would find his Claire.
Charles turned his head toward where he sensed vaguely the captain was and made a couple of grotesque faces before managing to produce the smile with which he wanted to accompany his joke.
“Because it’s written . . . ,” he managed to say, thrusting forever from his mind the naked body of Claire Haggerty, whom no one would rescue from the depths of the pyramid.
As he did so, Charles realized that his role in this story was none other than the deceiver, the king of deceivers, the trickster, the man whose task it was to conceal the truth from the hero so that he could go on being one. Yes, his role had been that of the man who lied to safeguard the future. And, embracing this minor role Fate had reserved for him, Charles Winslow allowed the darkness to penetrate him and his soul to dissolve into the void.
Captain Shackleton contemplated Charles for a few moments, then he reached out and gently closed his eyelids, giving his friend the appearance of finally being at rest, his ravaged face bathed in a deserving and infinite peace. He picked up the remains of the wax candle he had been pressing in his fingers while he was speaking, molding it into a shape that Charles, in his confusion, could believe was the marker that proved the existence of an army of the future that was coming to find him. Then he placed it on the table, wondering whether Ashton might get him another candle stub the following day, and whether it would be long before Charles’s shackle activated itself and marched him off to the funnel, or whether he would have to lay his body on the floor so that he could sleep on the pallet. He needed to sleep. At dawn they would once more take him over to the women’s camp, and he wanted to be as rested as possible, because, who could tell, tomorrow might be the day when at last he found Claire.
? ? ?
NATURALLY, THE CAPTAIN DIDN’T find Claire the following day, or the day after, or any of the many days that carried on silently piling up until they had become another year. But that is another story, one I hope you will forgive me for not having time to tell you now, because our story is about to take a different tack. Perhaps on another occasion, in which case I shall do so with pleasure. However, before we leave the brave Captain Shackleton in his cell dreaming of his beloved Claire, allow me to be so bold as to request that, despite the scene I have just described to you, you do not think badly of him. I am sure that during the course of this tale, many of you, just like Charles, will have been unsure what to think of Captain Shackleton. Influenced by Charles’s incessant doubts, you will have asked yourselves over and over whether this man is the real Captain Shackleton, who in the year 2000 will save the world, or on the contrary whether he is an impostor, an opportunist who passes himself off as the captain in order to win the heart of a beautiful, rich young woman who would otherwise be unobtainable. Did this man travel from the future for love, or did love force him to invent a past? Is this the real Captain Shackleton, who made up a story so Charles would die a happy man, or is he a charlatan who felt pity for his dying friend? Is he a fraud or a hero? At the risk of upsetting you, I shall take the liberty of not telling you now. As I said, one day I may be able to tell you the captain’s extraordinary story, and the amazing adventures that still await him, and if so, I promise then to reveal the mystery of his identity.
In the meantime, all I will say is whether or not he is an impostor, this man now sighing in his cell, imagining that he might find his beloved on the morrow, is obviously a true hero. But not because in the future he may or may not behead the evil Solomon with his sword, thus saving the human race. There are other, more subtle ways of being a hero. Is it not heroic to make a dying man dream of a better world as he has just done for poor Charles? As Charles Winslow was dying, through the veil of death he glimpsed a victorious planet Earth, rebuilt by the captain and his men, a world more beautiful than the one he had known. Ought we not to consider someone a hero who succeeds in creating a perfect world, if only for a single moment and for one man? And was not Murray also a hero for making Emma die with a smile on her lips? And so were Richard Adams Locke and many others who, through their imagination, have managed to save hundreds of lives. Indeed, and among these heroes should be included the false or the real Captain Shackleton, who chose to give his dying friend Charles his own Map of the Sky, a sky where the sunset would at last possess the longed-for colors of his childhood.
XXXVIII
MORE THAN SEVENTY YEARS BEFORE Charles’s soul dissolved into the void, another soul emerged from the void. And although the birth took less than a second, Wells felt as though an invisible hand were reconstructing the whole of him piece by piece, hastily screwing together his various bones to create a skeleton, garlanding them with veins, arteries, and ligaments and then scattering a handful of organs around the improvised framework, finally wrapping it all up in the packaging of his flesh. Once the finishing touch of his skin was in place, Wells was suddenly struck by feelings of cold, tiredness, nausea, and other miseries characteristic of the body he had been dragging around with him for as long as he could remember, and which fastened him to reality like an anchor. Then he found himself submerged in murky, foul-smelling water, only to be ejected a moment later by the force of the current, which sent him flying through the air to land in a calm stretch of water.