The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(181)

Then a snowstorm rose, violently whipping at him. Within a few seconds, Wells could scarcely see anything around him. The act of breathing felt like razors ripping through his throat on their way to his lungs. Snow began to settle on his clothes, weighing him down, slowing his unsteady gait, until his exhaustion, and in particular the futility of it all, made him sink once more to his knees. The cold was becoming more and more unbearable, and he knew he was going to die of exposure, to experience in his own body the terrible process of freezing to death. According to what he knew from his studies, tiny crystals would first form in his fingers and toes, where the blood would have difficulty circulating due to the narrowing of his blood vessels, causing unspeakable pain in his limbs, which would gradually stop obeying the commands of his brain. Next would come the arrhythmias, then his entire body would become insensible, to the point where he would urinate and defecate uncontrollably, after which he would suffer successive respiratory arrests that would bring him close to asphyxiation. His epiglottis and larynx would become paralyzed, and finally, after several hours submerged in a cruel numbness, he would lose consciousness and die without even realizing it.

Horrified by this thought, Wells curled up in the snow, cursing, weeping, laughing, wishing he had never read about what he was now going to experience in his own body. Time went by out of inertia, or perhaps it did not go by at all, for there was nothing to measure its passing, and the cold became so intense that it transcended its own meaning, becoming something else, until Wells no longer knew where the cold ended and he began, because everything was as one. He was the cold, and try as he might, he could not feel the limits of his own body, he could not discover the frontier of flesh that defined him. His numbness was such that he feared he might already have died at some point, without his body having told him.

Yet he was able to have thoughts: he could evoke Jane’s smile, and so he must still be alive, though it would not be long before he slowly began to die out like a fire that cannot be rekindled. At that moment, he was seized by panic, and somewhere in his mind, which also felt frozen, he became aware of a familiar sensation, a sensation of dizziness that rapidly spread through his head. All of a sudden, the cold that was tormenting him vanished, because all of him vanished. Wells experienced an immense and wonderful feeling of relief, but a moment later, he found himself locked inside himself once more, trapped in the frozen sarcophagus that was his body. Something warm, his semithawed soul perhaps, crept up his throat, and he vomited onto the snow. But the dizziness did not stop. On the contrary, Wells could feel it becoming more intense, and again he felt as though he were being torn from himself, floating through the air, released from all suffering only for the pain and cold to return a moment later.

Nauseated, Wells vomited onto the snow, two, three, countless times, while part of his brain realized he was traveling back and forth in time, racing blindly through the years, perhaps through the centuries, scattering his errant footsteps throughout eternity. His body yearned to escape death, that terrible, interminable numbness overwhelming him, threatening to freeze his guts. But what was the use of fleeing in time if he was trapped in space, always greeted by the same hostile landscape, this icy vastness intent on becoming his last resting place, at times plunged into darkness, at times barely illuminated by a weak sun shining in the sky like a bead of mercury. He could not escape from a place that seemed older than time itself. After a while, faint from the exertion, Wells noticed that his nausea had finally subsided. A soft light was making the snow sparkle, and the cold was not so biting. The temperature must have been three or four degrees, Wells estimated, and, exhausted as he was, he managed a weak smile of gratitude. For a while, he lay sprawled on the ground, expecting another leap through time, but nothing happened. On the brink of unconsciousness, he wondered whether the strange mechanism in his brain had been driven so hard it had burned out. Just like the Annawan in the ice, his body had finally become trapped in some unknown year, about which all he knew was that it would be the year of his death.

Then he saw the face of God.

It was a sallow face, with high cheekbones and almond eyes that radiated an intelligent simplicity. For a moment, they gazed at him fixedly, as though attempting to recognize in him a stray sheep, and, perhaps because he had atoned for his mistake and saved the planet, God decided he should live. He picked him up with his diminutive hands and stretched him out on a sleigh. Wells was conscious of something being laid on top of him, keeping him warm, and then he heard a sharp hissing noise, a kind of crackle, which a few moments later he realized must be the sound of the sledge gliding over the snow. God was taking him somewhere, and after a while, whether days, hours, or centuries he did not know, he heard voices, a swarm of words in varying tones the meaning of which he could not grasp. He felt hands examining him and undressing him, until finally the world stopped spinning and he came to a halt in a warm sense of well-being. And although, immersed in a fog of unconsciousness, Wells had no clear understanding of what was going on, he noticed that the cold had vanished. He was no longer caught in its terrible maw, and gradually he was able to perceive the forgotten contours of his body: he could feel his toes touching what he thought was a blanket, his back lying on something pleasantly silky, his head cushioned in a cocoon of softness. He was once more firmly defined in the world.

One day, he did not know how long afterward, he awoke in a bunk in a warm, cozy cabin. He was at what appeared to be a whaling station, alive and seemingly in one piece, although his right hand was bandaged. He was unable to tell what year he was in from the furniture or from the clothing worn by those drifting in and out of his cabin, and so, to everyone’s surprise, he announced his emergence from unconsciousness by asking what year it was. He was told it was the year of our Lord 1865. Wells nodded and smiled weakly. He had not fled far. It was possible he had taken bigger leaps while he was dying on the ice, but he had no way of knowing. Now he found himself thirty-five years ahead in time from the day he had harpooned the Envoy’s monstrous body and scarcely a year before the moment when, in a humble, bug-infested dwelling in Bromley, a man identical to him in every respect would be born.