The Map of Chaos (21 page)

After crossing a couple of streets, doing his best to imitate the sprightly gait of a young colt, Dr. Clive Higgins hailed a carriage on Gower Street, gave the driver the address of the Albemarle Club, and slumped into his seat with an exasperated groan. Once inside, he unbuttoned his overcoat, tore off his gloves and scarf, and removed his hat. Fanning himself with the latter, he watched the carriage skirting Soho via Oxford Street while he continued to gasp for air, as though he were crossing a scorching desert instead of traversing London on an inclement October day. However, shortly before arriving at his destination, he put everything back on, assumed a placid air, and stepped out of the carriage. He proceeded to mount the steps to the Albemarle Club with the briskness of someone whose overriding desire is for a warm fire and a glass of brandy.

Once inside, having shed his warm clothes again, and pretending to shiver as he handed the damp garments to a solicitous attendant, he made his way with the same jaunty walk toward a table beside a large window, greeting with peremptory nods any members he passed. At the table, which stood next to the only unlit fire in the room, four gentlemen reclined comfortably in leather armchairs, smoking and chatting congenially among themselves. However, when they spotted Dr. Higgins walking toward them across the vast room, the four of them stopped conversing and watched him approach in expectant silence.

“Good day, gentlemen,” the doctor said gruffly as he took a seat among them and gestured impatiently to the nearest waiter.

“You're late, Higgins,” one of the men chided, smiling.

“My dear Angier, perhaps we are all too late,” the doctor grunted, giving his goatee a few desperate tugs.

“Come, come, Higgins, what's eating you?” another of the gentlemen retorted in a mollifying voice, which you will recognize if you have been paying attention, for it was none other than Doctor Theodore Ramsey, the eminent physician so fond of cracking his knuckles. “We thought you might bring good tidings.”

Higgins snatched the glass of brandy from the waiter's tray before the man had time to place it on the table and greedily swallowed almost half of it, closing his eyes as he did so. Then he gave a sigh.

“Forgive me, my friends. Please accept my apologies, Angier. I'm at my wit's end. My cooling system has been on the blink all morning,” he declared, pulling impatiently at his beard as if to prove it. “I've been insufferably hot for hours.”

The others gave him concerned looks.

“How ghastly! And you haven't been able to repair it?” asked Angier, fiddling with his right earlobe, visibly alarmed.

“I haven't had time. As you guessed, Ramsey, I bring tidings. I'm not sure yet if they are good or not, but I wanted to pass them on without delay. In any case, I expect I can hold out until this afternoon, and I think I have the means to fix the problem in my laboratory . . . I just wish it wasn't so damnably hot!”

“Don't grumble, Higgins. You're lucky it's the beginning of winter, the coldest season in their year. Imagine if this had happened during that inferno they call summer,” remarked a third gentleman, who every now and then crossed his eyes in a most peculiar fashion as he spoke. “And things could be worse. For example, you could be having trouble with the neuronal circuitry that allows us to suppress the anxiety of randomness.”

“You're right, Melford,” Ramsey agreed vehemently, cracking his knuckles one by one. “
The anxiety of randomness
 . . . A truly terrifying thing.”

“Quite so. But a malfunction in the cooling system is still an absolute nuisance. It happened to me last summer,” Angier added, flicking his earlobe gently, “and I had to beg them to send me a new mechanism as soon as—”

“Inferno? Did I hear you say ‘inferno,' Melford?” the fourth gentleman, who had so far remained silent, interrupted in a soft voice.

He was a stout fellow with bushy grey whiskers that curled up like a bull's horns, and he wore a plain dark suit livened up by a florid waistcoat. The other men looked at him in surprise.

“I . . . ,” stammered Melford.

“
Inferno?
Surely you aren't serious, any of you . . . You grumble about the climate? It is so obvious you haven't been to the Other Side recently! Have you forgotten what it is like there?” The fourth gentleman observed his companions one by one, his impressive whiskers quivering with rage, causing all of them, more or less swiftly, to lower their eyes contritely. “The minor discomforts we have to put up with here,” the man went on in a lecturing tone, “pale in comparison. I say this as someone who has just come back from there. From the place where we have no choice but to suffer the insufferable.” Satisfied with his admonishment, he settled back in his chair, relaxing slightly his harsh expression. “Gentlemen, I beg you not to trivialize such matters. On the Other Side, the Dark Time has begun. And they need us. Desperately.”

The five of them fell silent for a few moments, eyes vacant as they became lost in thought.

“How are things back there, Kramer?” Ramsey ventured at last.

“It is getting colder all the time,” the other man replied. “And there is no light now.”

They all groaned quietly.

“Perhaps Higgins was right when he said just now that we arrived here too late.” Melford squinted. “Perhaps nothing we do here has any meaning now.”

“There is still some hope. Recent calculations give us ten years,” said Kramer.

“By all the dead suns!” Angier gasped. “Ten years? I hardly think that is long enough.”

“Calm down, Angier. You know very well that period refers to
their
extinction, not ours,” said Kramer, gesturing with a nod at their surroundings. “Our torment could last a few more decades, but they don't have that long. And they are our only escape route. We have ten years to prevent their destruction. Otherwise, we will be doomed as well.”

“And what do recent studies show about the possibility of opening other doors?” asked Melford.

“Nothing promising,” Kramer replied ruefully. “I fear that won't be possible. Not in our current situation. This world is the only chance we have of saving ourselves.”

“But they have only ten years left . . . ,” muttered Angier.

Kramer raised his arms suddenly, like an odalisque sprinkling rose petals.

“These are rough calculations, gentlemen, although there is little margin for error,” he said. “We have ten years, possibly a bit longer, to find a way of preventing the epidemic ravaging this world. If we fail, an apocalypse of devastating proportions will be unleashed. And we on the Other Side, like a drowning man whose fingers slip fatally from the flotsam to which he is clinging, will plunge forever into eternal darkness and oblivion.”

They all remained silent and cast their eyes around the room. The Albemarle Club, founded in 1874, was one of the most prestigious and popular clubs in London. At that time of day, however, there were only a few clusters of armchairs dotted about, forming small islands, and a handful of gentlemen smoking their solitary pipes, absentmindedly cupping a brandy glass, or reading a newspaper with an air of boredom, content to have escaped from their suffocating homes for a few hours.

“Look at them . . . ,” muttered Melford, with a sudden flash of animosity. “They haven't the slightest idea how sick their world is, or that it is nearing its end. On the contrary: they think they are in the middle of something. They think they are different from everything before and everything after. They think they are speeding toward some destination on one of their swift trains. They study, contemplate, marvel at one another. And yet they see nothing. They don't see that the end is coming, nor do they suspect that all possible trains will soon collide into a morass of eternal darkness, nothingness, chaos.”

“But how could they, Melford!” Doctor Ramsey said, almost reprovingly. “They are so far from the Supreme Knowledge! At times I feel ashamed of having made my name as a scientist in this world, where all I can offer is baubles . . . but other times I can't help laughing at their monumental ignorance . . .” He gave a hollow laugh and took a sip of brandy to steady himself. “Although it is true that among them there are some whose intelligence shines out above the rest, and whose company can be a pleasant balm to us poor, lonely exiles . . .” Ramsey noticed his companions' stern looks and nodded, trying to sound cheerier. “Naturally, I am referring to a companionship that is productive and advances our sacred mission. As you know, thanks to my prestige as a scientist and my friendship with Mr. Crookes, I have been able to infiltrate spiritualist circles and to carry out various studies of countless apparitions that have been well received on the Other Side. Some mediums' ectoplasmic materializations offer plenty of answers! I assume you have read my latest report, where I elaborated an interesting table comparing the—”

“We are aware of your research into spiritualism, Ramsey. We also know about your friendship with that Crookes fellow, which placed us in such danger when you almost gave our mission away,” Kramer scolded him severely.

“I never endangered our mission!” Ramsey protested fiercely.

“Settle down, my friend,” Kramer warned with icy calm.

“It was only a moment of weakness . . . ,” the doctor went on, instantly lowering his tone. “But in the end I did my duty. Crookes knows nothing, and he never will, I can assure you . . . And so it should to be. None of the inhabitants of this world should know the truth: they would never understand our mission. They would see us as menacing invaders. They would fear us as one fears the unknown. They would turn us into the stuff of nightmares and try to destroy us. We cannot trust them. Or feelings such as love or friendship that cloud our minds,” he insisted. “I haven't forgotten that, gentlemen. Like Armand de Bompard, I never forget the wonderful world from which I come.”

“Our world, oh, our wonderful world . . . ,” Melford chipped in, with a nostalgia that wasn't entirely devoid of irony. “As we speak, on the Other Side, our miraculous civilization is cowering around the last remaining black holes. Our bodies, skillfully modified to survive the cold, dead ocean of darkness, will soon cease to function. And our minds will be capable of only the most sluggish connections, frozen in a long, dark nirvana. Until in the end we are converted into a lifeless cloud of dead particles. So it is written in the second law. A law we arrogantly believed we could escape. But the second law is inevitable. Chaos is inevitable!”

“Chaos is inevitable!” his companions intoned as one, taking out their fob watches, opening them to reveal the engraving inside: a star containing a tiny circle with eight arrows pointing outward and piercing a second, concentric circle. A star I am sure you are familiar with.

“Chaos is inevitable!” repeated Kramer. “You are quite right, Melford, and we mustn't forget that. But there is still a glimmer of hope. Do you recall not so long ago when we managed to open the tunnel to this side? For one glorious instant we thought we had succeeded.” They all nodded, smiling weakly, a flicker of that distant hope in their eyes. “Wasn't it wonderful? The news spread like wildfire among our scientists. A stable tunnel had been opened! We had the chance of starting afresh in another world! A young world, full of light and heat. A universe where stars were still being born. A new, warm planet where we would inject the seed of our doomed civilization. Where we would be reborn, far from our inhospitable, dying home—”

“But that world was sick!” Angier thumped the table with his clenched fist, making the brandy glasses shake and a couple of members look up disgruntled from their newspapers. “I also remember the day we discovered it was ravaged by a strange epidemic of apocalyptic proportions, and that its end might even be nearer than our own. Yes, I also remember that. And how, in spite of everything, we kept our faith: we believed we could find a cure in time for the Great Exodus. But no one is certain we will succeed now, are they, Kramer?” he asked, each word loaded with anguish. “It's been a long time and we still haven't obtained any results. We don't know how the virus got here, or when the disease started. We don't know who was infected first. We have no idea how to cure it. And we still haven't produced a vaccine. After all this time, we continue to know nothing about it, Kramer. Nothing. As you said, there is hope, but it is rapidly diminishing . . .”

“We still have ten years left,” Kramer retorted. “And the Executioners might provide us with an extra one or two.”

“The Executioners!” Doctor Ramsey snorted, cracking his knuckles. “It is shocking that we have had to resort to those ruthless killers. By all the dead suns! We're a level QIII civilization, and have been for thousands of years. And now, having reached the end of the road, we high priests of Wisdom can think of nothing better than to order a slaughter. That will be our magnificent legacy, gentlemen. A slaughter of innocents, like the one perpetrated by their King Herod, only on a universal scale.” He gave another joyless laugh. “When our end comes, our atoms will float in the eternal void, representing forever and for no one the image of barbarism—”

“The Executioners are a necessary evil for the time being . . . ,” Kramer interrupted him sharply. “We created them because we needed more time. We never considered them the ideal solution, Ramsey. You mustn't become agitated, and that goes for you too, Angier. I won't say it again. Either you calm down or I shall be forced to report your excitable state to the Other Side. If it weren't for the Executioners, this would all have ended a long time ago. We are simply building a dam in order to try to contain the uncontainable, to give us time to investigate the sickness. If we still have ten years in which to do so, then it is thanks to their work, gentlemen. Although the fact remains that we all dislike them,” he admitted, with a final shudder.