The Map of Chaos (2 page)

A red carpet had been rolled out in front of the palace doors, and on either side a noisy crowd was brandishing every sort of placard while a dozen bobbies tried to contain their fervor. Since its construction, the cathedralesque building had been the stage of great symposia regarding the dimensions of the universe, the origins of time, or the existence of the super-atom, all legendary debates whose most memorable phrases and parries had passed into common usage. The ornithopter circled the palace towers, hovering for a moment before alighting on a clear area of street cordoned off for that purpose. The cleaner-spiders had made the windows gleam, and the mechanical pelicans had devoured the garbage in the gutters, leaving that part of the city spotless and crying out to be sullied anew. When the ornithopter had finally landed, a liveried automaton went to hold open the door for its occupants. Before stepping out, Wells glanced at Jane with a look of combined resolve and fear; she responded with a reassuring smile. The crowd burst into a unanimous roar of jubilation as he emerged from the vehicle. Wells could hear shouts of encouragement mixed with the booing of his rival's supporters. With Jane on his arm, he crossed the gauntlet that was the red carpet, following the automaton and waving to the public as he tried hard to project the serenity of one who considers himself far superior to his opponent.

They walked through the portal, which bore an inscription in huge bronze lettering: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Once inside, the automaton led them along a narrow corridor to a dressing room and then offered to take Jane to the VIP box. It was time for them to part. Jane went over to Wells and straightened his tie.

“Don't worry, Bertie. You're going to be fine.”

“Thank you, my dear,” he mumbled.

They closed their eyes and gently joined foreheads for a few seconds, each honoring the other's mind. After that intimate gesture, with which couples conveyed how necessary and enlightening the other's company was for them in their collective journey toward Knowledge, Jane looked straight at her husband.

“Best of luck, my dear,” she told him before declaring: “Chaos is inevitable.”

“Chaos is inevitable,” Wells repeated diligently.

He wished he could leave his wife with the slogan used in his parents' day: “We are what we know,” which so faithfully summed up the aspirations of their generation. However, since the discovery of the dreadful fate that awaited the universe, the Church had imposed this new slogan to raise awareness that the end was nigh.

After saying good-bye, Jane followed the automaton to the VIP box. As Wells watched her walk away, he admired yet again the miraculous sequence of genes that had created this woman, slender and lovely as a Dresden figurine, a sequence he had been unable to resist secretly unraveling in his laboratory, despite feeling that there was something oddly obscene about reducing his wife to an abstract jumble of facts and formulas. Before she disappeared at the end of the corridor, Jane gave him a final smile of encouragement, and the biologist experienced a sudden desire to kiss his wife's lips. He instantly chastised himself. A kiss? What was he thinking? That gesture had long been obsolete, ever since the Church of Knowledge deemed it unproductive and subversive. Gloomily, he resolved to examine his response at length once the debate was over. The Church encouraged people from an early age to analyze everything, including their feelings, to map out their inner selves and learn to repress any emotion that wasn't useful or easily controlled. It wasn't that love, or passion, or friendship was forbidden. Love of books or a passion for research was heartily approved of, provided the mind was in charge. But love between two people could take place only under strict surveillance. It was possible to abandon oneself freely to love (indeed, the Church encouraged young people to mate in order to perpetuate the species), but it was also necessary to spend time analyzing love, examining its hidden motives, drawing diagrams of it and comparing them with those of a partner, presenting regular reports on love's origin, evolution, and inconsistencies to the local parish priest, who would help scrutinize those treacherous emotions until they could be understood, for understanding was what made it possible to control everything. And yet, none of those emotions survived such scrutiny. The more you understood them, the fainter they became, like a dream fading as you try to recall it.

Wells couldn't help admiring the Church of Knowledge's ingenious solution to this thorny issue. By insisting love be understood, it had created the perfect vaccine against love. Prohibiting love would have elevated it, made it more desirable, capable of fomenting uprisings, wars, and acts of revenge. In short, it would have brought about another Dark Era, which would only have stood in the way of progress. And what would have become of them then? Would they have gotten that far had they allowed their feelings to govern them? Would they have amassed all that Knowledge, which as things stood might prove their only route to salvation? Wells didn't think so. He was convinced that the key to the survival of the species lay in the judicious act of bridling mankind's emotional impulses, unshackling humans from their feelings just as thousands of years before they had been freed from their instincts. Yet there were times, when he watched Jane sleeping, that he couldn't stop himself from having doubts. Contemplating the placid abandon of her lovely face, the extreme fragility of her body momentarily deprived of the admirable personality that infused it with life, he would wonder whether the path to salvation and the path to happiness were one and the same.

Brushing aside these thoughts, he entered the dressing room, the tiny space where he must spend the last few minutes before walking out onstage. He stood in the middle of the room, choosing not to sit on any of the chairs. The door opposite led to the auditorium. Through it filtered the excited roars of the crowd and the voice of Abraham Frey, the celebrated moderator, who at that moment was welcoming the various dignitaries attending the event. Soon they would announce his name, and he would have to go out onto the stage. Wells ruefully contemplated the right-hand wall. He knew that on the other side of it, in the adjoining dressing room, his rival was doubtless listening to the cries of the audience resounding through the amphitheater with the same feigned determination.

Then Wells heard his name and the door opened, inviting him to abandon his sanctuary. He took a deep breath and strode forth onto the back of the stage. Seeing him, the crowd burst into feverish applause. A couple of the recording orbs floating above the auditorium whirled over and began circling him. Wells raised his hands in greeting as he gave his most serene smile, imagining it being reproduced on the communication screens in millions of homes. He walked over to his lectern, which bore the stem of a voice enhancer, and spread his hands over its surface. One of the spotlights located above the stage bathed his puny figure in a golden glow. Five or six yards to his right, his opponent's lectern stood empty. While acknowledging the applause, the biologist took the opportunity to examine the stalls, separated from him by the pit, where a mechanical orchestra had started to play an evocative melody. Music creates order out of chaos, he thought, recalling the words of a famous violinist who had received the Church's blessing. Amidst the audience, Wells noticed banners and signs sporting his image as well as some of his famous sayings. Up above the rows of seats, beneath an enormous pennant with an eight-pointed star emerging from two concentric circles, Queen Victoria sat on her wheeled throne, in which she traveled everywhere of late. Next to her, on a less sumptuous throne, sat Cardinal Violet Tucker, the highest authority in the Church of Knowledge, who would preside over the debate. Her entourage sat in a cluster on her left, a flock of bishops and deacons with stern, embittered faces, who, together with the cardinal, made up the Budgetary Commission. That gaunt old lady, dressed in a black robe with gold silk buttons, and a sash and beret likewise gold, the color of Knowledge, would ultimately decide his fate. Wells noticed the goblet cupped in her right hand, which if the rumors were correct contained her anti-cancer medicine. On either side of the theater stood the boxes reserved for the authorities and prominent attendees, most notably Jules Verne, the French entrepreneur; Clara Shelley, the heiress to Prometheus Industries, a leading manufacturer of automatons; and various members of the scientific community. Wells could see Jane in the VIP box. She was talking to Doctor Pleasance, the wife of his rival, a handsome woman of about forty who, like Jane, worked as project director in her husband's laboratory.

Pacing up and down the stage between the orchestra pit and the lecterns was Abraham Frey, who wore a bronze helmet that had a voice enhancer projecting from its right side, leaving his hands free to perform their characteristic gestures. At that moment, he was introducing Wells's opponent, listing his many achievements over a long life devoted to the service of Knowledge. Inundated by this torrent of information, Wells was able to make out the words “Knowledge Church College,” in Oxford, where his rival had given his celebrated lectures in mathematics and physics, and where Wells himself had studied. There, conversing between its ancient walls and strolling across its verdant meadows, the two men had forged an inspiring teacher-pupil relationship, and although Wells had finally chosen biology over physics, they had continued to meet regularly, incapable of renouncing a friendship they had both deemed fruitful enough to pursue. No one could have imagined that, in years to come, fate would make rivals of them. While in private this was a source of amusement to them, it in no way diminished the ferocity with which each defended his position during the many debates they had engaged in prior to the one taking place that evening, in which the Church would decide which of their projects was most likely to save the world.

“And now, Your Majesty, Your Eminence, leaders of the Church of Knowledge, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the distinguished physicist and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.”

Followers of Wells's rival broke into loud cheers as their idol's name was announced. The tiny door to his dressing room opened, and an elderly gentlemen of about sixty emerged, waving to the public as he approached his lectern, just as Wells had done moments before. He was tall and thin, his white hair meticulously groomed, and his face possessed the languid beauty of a weary archangel. As he watched him, Wells couldn't help feeling a sense of compassion. Clearly, Charles Dodgson would have preferred to be spending that magnificent, golden evening on one of his habitual boating excursions along the Thames rather than arguing with his former pupil about how best to save the world, yet neither man could shirk his responsibilities. They greeted each other with a stiff nod, and each stood quietly at his lectern, waiting for the moderator to begin. Frey called for silence, stroking the flank of the air with his hand.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he exclaimed in the baritone voice for which he was famous. “As we all know, our beloved universe is dying. And it has been for millions of years. Ever since the universe burst forth amidst a blazing cataclysm, it has been expanding at breakneck speed, but it has also been cooling. And that same cooling process that once nurtured life will eventually snuff it out.” He paused, plunging his hands into his jacket pockets, and started pacing up and down the stage, staring at the ground, like a man on a stroll daydreaming. “Subject to the three laws of thermodynamics,” he went on, “the galaxies are flying apart. Everything is aging. Wearing out. The end of the world is near. Stars will burn out, magic holes evaporate, temperatures will descend to absolute zero. And we humans, incapable of continuing our work in this frozen landscape . . . will become extinct.”

Frey gave a woeful sigh and began to shake his head silently, drawing out the suspense, until at last he exclaimed, almost in anger: “But we aren't plants, or helpless creatures that must resign themselves to a tragic destiny. We are Mankind! And having assimilated this terrible discovery, Mankind began to wonder whether there wasn't a way of surviving the inevitable, even the death of the universe itself. And the answer, ladies and gentlemen, was yes! But this does not mean we should challenge chaos like a suicidal warrior, defying Nature . . . and God. No, such a display of bravado would be absurd. It would be enough . . . to flee, to emigrate to another universe. Is that possible? Can we leave this condemned universe for another, more hospitable one and begin once again? And if so, how? Formulas have been scrawled on the blackboards of all the world's laboratories in an attempt to find out. But perhaps our salvation depends on one of the two exceptional minds here with us today.”

Wells contemplated the audience, who were loudly applauding the moderator's speech. Placards and banners waved about like buffeted trees. Everyone there had been born into a world under sentence of death, and although they might not be around to experience the end Frey had so starkly depicted, the so-called Day of Chaos, they knew that their grandchildren or great-grandchildren would. All estimates now spoke in terms of a few generations, because the cooling of the universe was happening more quickly than had first been predicted. And was this the legacy they wanted to leave their descendants, a frozen universe where life was impossible? No, of course not. God had thrown down the glove, and Man had picked it up. The first thing Wells's mother had told him when he was old enough to understand was that everything he could see (which at that moment was the backyard of their house in Bromley, but also the sky and the trees peeping out from behind the wall) would be destroyed, because the Creator hadn't made the world to last forever, although he had been kind enough to give man a short enough life span so that he could have the illusion that it would. Like most young men and women of his generation, Wells had devoured countless books in his compulsive pursuit of Knowledge, spurred on by a romantic ambition to save the world. Could there be a more noble achievement? And perhaps, that very evening, what had once been a child's naïve dream would become reality, for Wells was the leading proponent of one of the two most important theories about how to save humanity.