The Map of Time (55 page)
Authors: Félix J Palma
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #steampunk, #General
In the first case, he had been forced to pretend he possessed a time machine like the one in his novel, and in the second that he was a hero from the future who wrote love letters. Was there material for a novel in any of this? Possibly. A novel narrating the creation of a company called Murray’s Time Travel, in which he, unfortunately, had played a part, a novel that surprised its readers towards the middle when it was revealed that the year 2000 was no more than a stage set built with rubble from a demolition (although this, of course, would only be a revelation to readers from Wells’s own time). If such a novel survived the passage of time, and was read by people living after the year 2000 there would be nothing to reveal, for reality itself would have given the lie to the future described in the story. But did that mean it was impossible to write a novel set in Wells’s time speculating about a future that was already the author’s past? The thought saddened him. He preferred to believe his readers would understand they were meant to read the novel as if they were in 1896, as if they, in fact, had experienced a journey through time. Still, since he did not have the makings of a hero, he would have to be a secondary character in the novel, someone to whom others, the story’s true protagonists, came to for help.
If someone in a neighboring universe had decided to write about his life, in whatever time, he hoped for their sake that this was the last page, as he very much doubted his life would carry on in the same vein. He had probably exhausted his quota of excitement in the past two weeks, and from this point on his life would carry on once more in peaceable monotony, like that of any other writer.
He gazed at Andrew Harrington, the character with whom he would have started this hypothetical novel, and, as he saw him walk away bathed in the golden glow of dawn, perhaps with a euphoric smile playing about his lips, he told himself that this was the perfect image with which to end the tale. He wondered, as if somehow he were able to see or hear me, whether at that very moment someone was not doing precisely that, and then experiencing the rush of joy every writer feels when finishing a novel, a happiness nothing else in life can bring, not sipping Scotch whiskey in the bathtub until the water goes cold, nor caressing a woman’s body, not the touch on the skin of the delicious breeze heralding the arrival of summer.