The Map of Chaos (68 page)

Of course, none of the servants were aware that these were the infinite stages of the theater collapsing and colliding, the myriad different worlds crashing against one another. The end of the world had begun, ladies and gentlemen. But instead of trumpets, it was heralded by the frenzied tinkle of a hundred bells.

F
IFTEEN MINUTES EARLIER
, D
R.
R
AMSEY HAD
gotten out of bed, unaware that this was the last day of the universe. He liked rising at a quarter to eight in order to perform his ablutions, which included, among other things, a perilous shave with the rudimentary razor from that world. Unlike his colleagues, who had brought electric shavers with them in their trousseaus of microscopic and sundry devices from the Other Side, Ramsey felt a sentimental attachment to that relic from the past. He considered that the slow, measured rhythm it required of him was the best way to help him adapt to the unhurried pace of that world. After managing to finish his conventional shave without slitting his throat, he went down to the dining room, unaware that behind him in the bathroom mirror an intricate maze had appeared, in the midst of which stood a bored-looking Minotaur. With his customary punctuality, Ramsey's servant had just laid out his peculiar breakfast: a cup of coffee swimming in ice cubes, different types of fruit arranged on a thick bed of crushed ice, and assorted flavors of ice cream. After casting a doleful glance through the window at the sunny autumn day outside, Ramsey sat down at the table with a faint sigh, cracked his knuckles, picked up the newspaper, and began to read the headlines on that ordinary September 23, 1900, unaware that, as I have already told you, dear reader, in the world he inhabited at least, this was the dreaded Day of Chaos.

He turned the pages wearily, no news items drawing his attention, since most of the articles were still reporting on the powerful hurricane that had razed the city of Galveston, Texas, to the ground on September 8, with the loss of approximately eight thousand souls. Ramsey looked with vague curiosity at some of the photographs showing dozens of carts brimming with dead bodies and endless funeral pyres dotted along the beach, where they were incinerating the hideously bloated corpses that the ocean continued to disgorge onto the sand. Ramsey pulled a face and carried on thumbing nonchalantly through the newspaper. After all these years, he still couldn't help being surprised at the dreadful fuss the humans on this side made whenever Nature flexed her muscles, as if they had never heard of the second law of thermodynamics. Chaos is inevitable, he muttered to himself. The same law had been discovered in the majority of worlds in that multiverse, and yet its inhabitants seemed to take great pains to ignore it. Tornados, earthquakes, meteorites, ice ages . . . such phenomena terrified and astonished them in equal measure, despite being as insignificant as a couple of mosquito bites that only affected their minuscule planet, nothing compared to the Dark Era, the frozen, black, irreversible end that awaited the entirety of the universes . . . and that he had seen with his own eyes.

He set the newspaper aside wearily, dropped a couple more ice cubes into his coffee, and, leaning back in his chair, began to stare into the distance, beyond the encircling walls, beyond the universe he found himself in at present, beyond all the worlds that coexisted in that room, recalling with sorrow the protracted war his civilization had decided to wage on chaos, which still wasn't over.

Ever since the Victorian age, long before he was born, the inhabitants of the Other Side had been trying to find a way to flee their doomed universe. For thousands of years they had been trying, even as the stars gradually began to die out and the firmament grew darker every night, but without success. And currently they had to confront another, more urgent problem of an almost domestic nature: the extinction of their own Sun, which had gradually turned into a red giant star, filling the sky and forcing the Earth's inhabitants to seek refuge beneath the sea. There they had built splendid underwater cities where the Church continued to guide the minds and hearts of its flock toward the Supreme Knowledge. Ramsey had no trouble imagining the giant squid that dwelled in the ocean's depths, where they had implanted their new Palace of Knowledge, yawning at the innumerable debates they had to have before deciding what to do next, while above them the oceans boiled and the mountains melted. Fortunately, they reached a decision in time: by drawing a couple of asteroids into the Earth's orbit, they managed slowly to steer the planet safely away from the raging ball of fire that had already swallowed Mercury and Venus. This ingenious solution bought them a little more time in which to carry on working on the only solution they considered ultimately viable: the Great Exodus to a different universe through a wormhole. However, successive generations failed to stabilize one of these holes, and after several more millennia as a red giant, the Sun finally exhausted its store of nuclear energy and cooled down, shrinking until it became a white dwarf, a tiny, pale speck that the cosmic winds eventually snuffed out, like a god blowing out a match. By that time, the universe had taken on a desolate air: most of the stars had burned out, and the planets orbiting around them had frozen over. The only surviving source of light and heat were the red dwarfs, tiny stars whose nuclear energy burned very slowly, giving off a weak, sickly light. The remarkable QIII civilization once more found a way of relocating the Earth's orbit around one of those dying fireflies, the Proxima Centauri, only 4.2 light-years away, and in its meager glow, mankind continued its research, impervious to discouragement. Even so, there were many who started to lose hope. They thought they would never succeed, that they would never escape the cold, dingy vault they had been confined to since the Creator had shut out the last rays of light, plunging them into eternal darkness. But they did. When Proxima Centauri's energy was almost expended, nearly all the other red dwarfs in the universe had expired. Mankind had remodeled the human body through genetic mutation, replacing most of the organs with mechanical parts in order to endure the freezing temperatures. Then they succeeded, managing to open a stable two-way wormhole, perfectly suitable for transmitting vast quantities of complex data, a passageway they could open and close at will and that led to a new universe, in a mid-stelliferous era, brimming with stars, trillions upon trillions of glistening bright lights illuminating the heavens from one side to the other. When they discovered that this was a multiple universe, consisting of infinite parallel universes, their joy was even greater, for it seemed that in a sudden gesture of magnanimity the Creator had given them the possibility of choosing, from among infinite worlds, which one they considered most suitable to be reborn in. The celebrations lasted for days and days. The Church of Knowledge declared holidays and bestowed praise and honors. Until, that is, they discovered that the multiverse was ailing, that the wormhole had taken them to a polluted paradise.

Ramsey placed his coffee cup on the table with a sigh and cracked his knuckles one by one. That awful discovery had been made three generations before, by his very own great-grandfather, the famous Scientist Timothy Ramsey. He was part of the team that had identified the epidemic after isolating the virus in the blood of a cronotemic the Executioners had captured and sent back to the Other Side for them to study. Of course, those poor wretches had lost their minds and died hours after their arrival in a world that must have seemed nightmarish to them, enveloped by a pitch-black sky, on whose horizon the only thing visible was an immense, terrifying vortex, darker than darkness itself, churning slowly and menacingly. Everything there seemed frozen, even time itself, and they had perished from exposure and from fear, clueless as to why they were dying or indeed where they were. But at least their warm blood had provided a few, albeit extremely discouraging, answers for that QIII civilization, which was almost out of options. When Proxima Centauri died, the inhabitants of the Other Side had used up all their remaining energy dragging the Earth into the orbit of a black hole, whose slow evaporation was one of the last, meager energy sources in the universe. This was another clever move, yet everyone knew there was nowhere else to go. When that source was extinguished forever, the temperature would reach absolute zero, the atoms would stop moving, the protons would disintegrate, and all intelligent life would be irremediably wiped out. Under such circumstances, the discovery of the epidemic was devastating. They no longer had the time or the energy to open up another magic hole to another universe. They realized then that there was only one possible solution: to try to cure the multiverse they had found, however small their hope of success.

Ramsey stood up, went over to the window, and contemplated the street, noticing with sadness how eternal and beautiful everything appeared when viewed from behind glass: in the distance the shiny dome of St. Paul's Cathedral stood out against the deep-blue sky, two men were chatting beneath his window, a couple were stepping out of a carriage, a pair of ragamuffins were sprinting along the pavement as if they had just stolen something, and the flower girl was arranging her blooms with the same care as every morning, all of them oblivious to the fact that they were living in a world that would soon come to an end. Would they carry on strolling beneath that autumn sun if an enormous ship suddenly appeared in the middle of the street, its cannons roaring, or if the earth spewed out a plague of giant ants? When the myriad parallel worlds started to collide, freakish visions such as these would surely appear before the Great Annihilation. The different universes and their realities would become jumbled up, the inhabitants of the infinite worlds thrown together before being shaken by the hand of an inebriated God and tossed onto the same board. And none of them would have a clue to what was happening. The only ones who knew would be Ramsey himself and a few other fortunate souls, if indeed they could consider themselves as such.

He clicked his tongue and walked back to the table to pour himself another cup of iced coffee before beginning his working day, which promised to be a particularly exhausting one. Fortunately, he told himself, the efforts made by those generations were finally about to bear fruit, or so it seemed. For the past twelve years, various scientists had been working on the blood sample Dr. Higgins had taken from Inspector Cornelius Clayton, and after countless experimental serums they had succeeded in synthesizing an effective vaccine. What a stroke of luck to have been able to obtain a blood sample from such a unique subject, Ramsey reflected. After exhaustive studies using the most advanced microscopes both there and on the Other Side, the CoCla cells, named in honor of their donor, had soon revealed that they were capable of isolating the virus and, in time, destroying it. When a natural Jumper had infected a suitable receptor, a miraculous combination had occurred, giving rise to a mutation that appeared to contain the definitive cure for the disease.

It made Ramsey sad to think of Armand de Bompard, the original champion of the theory, who had not lived to see the results of the line of research he himself had initiated. Bompard had always maintained that the key to combating the epidemic of cronotemics probably resided in the nature of the Jumpers, whose existence Scientists from the Other Side had become aware of when carrying out more in-depth studies of that multiverse. These were individuals who might have been sucked through specific hyperproximity points and who could jump between worlds naturally, with no need to be infected by a virus. The first known jumps dated back to long before the first appearance of that confounded epidemic, and so it was safe to suppose that the phenomenon had always existed. In any event, unlike the cronotemics, who traveled through the multiverse like cancerous cells, growing malignantly and destroying the healthy fabric of the universe, which hadn't the time or space to regenerate itself, the natural Jumpers wrought no such havoc, so that by studying them they might find answers. Convinced that his theory was correct, Armand de Bompard had been one of the first to volunteer to do fieldwork on this side. Although, according to what Ramsey had heard, after several years of fruitless research, Bompard had been on the verge of abandoning that line of investigation and would doubtless have done so if one morning he had not come across a pretty little girl lost and alone in a forest.

Bompard had been unable to resist taking her under his wing, suspecting almost from the beginning that she was not of this world. He gave her the appropriate tests, but, to his surprise, he found no trace of the cronotemia virus in her blood. He realized then that he had a natural Jumper living in his castle, and no ordinary one at that, as he would soon discover to his horror, but one who came from a very distant world. Bompard had heard rumors about such specimens but had never come across any, let alone been able to examine one. Very few beings managed to jump between such distinct worlds, and when they did, their strange natures inevitably turned them into monsters in the eyes of their new neighbors. Bompard realized that this little girl, whom he called Valerie, must have come from one of the most remote sectors of that multiverse, where, according to reports, vegetable, mineral, and animal were fused into one; where sentient and nonsentient beings lived together in harmony, like a single, miraculous entity. Nature made one species that flowed between various states, creating wolf-women, bat-men, flower-children, mist-elders, and wind-boys. And inevitably, when one of those beings jumped into a parallel world governed by different laws of physics, their organisms suffered abnormal mutations in an attempt to adapt themselves to their new surroundings. Many became tormented, crazed creatures, hungry for blood, their most savage instincts exacerbated by fear and a desire to survive. And so they lived like freaks amid the human population, feeding on the nightmares of men, who, at a loss to understand the true essence of these creatures, had invented a thousand names to describe that horror: werewolves, vampires, hobgoblins . . .