The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(138)
“Herbert George Wells, how can you be so callous!” Jane scolded. “Don’t you care what happened to Newton? We are to blame, or more precisely you are to blame! You injected him with that accursed virus! You made him—”
“Return to a state of calm, my dear.”
That old proverb, spoken in a tone long forgotten by them both, caused Jane to stop crying instantaneously, and she stared at her husband in astonishment.
“Listen, Jane,” Wells resumed before she had a chance to interrupt, “I’m sorry you are so beset by grief, and I wish I could do something to stop that, for two reasons: because I don’t like to see you suffering, and because it is clouding your mind. And I need your cleverness, Jane. I need it now. Think, dear, think . . . As you so rightly said, I injected the dog with the virus. A virus we didn’t know worked until we arrived here . . . Now, what do you think will happen if Newton has infected my twin with that virus? It could be more contagious now: it may have mutated and be active in humans . . .”
“But . . . heaven help us!” Jane opened her eyes wide as the implication of his words penetrated her mind. “If the virus begins to spread among humans, and those infected begin jumping between parallel worlds . . . what will happen then, Bertie?”
Wells looked at her gravely.
“I don’t know, my dear . . . But I fear I shall be responsible for something more than the sad demise of a dog.”
26
HOWEVER, FOR A WHILE, NOTHING happened. Wells’s twin who had been bitten by Newton did not begin jumping merrily between universes the way one might hop across a river on a row of stepping-stones. He was content to live his life, following in the dull footsteps of the majority of his twins, of whose existence he was in any case unaware. Nor, of course, did he suspect that the scar on his left hand made him unique, different from all the other Wellses, because the dog responsible was also unique and hadn’t leapt out of a bush, as though according to a preestablished plan, and attacked any other lad.
For months, Wells devoted himself to watching over this twin, for whom he now felt a special attachment, for he had become almost as unique as Wells himself. He delved into the lad’s mind in search of something (he wasn’t sure what: strange dreams, unusual feelings) that might betray the presence of the virus in his body. However, he had found nothing significant, except for the feverish cold his twin caught shortly after Newton attacked him, from which he recovered normally. And after two more years during which nothing out of the ordinary happened to him, Wells finally dismissed the idea that this fever was a reaction to the virus—a virus that appeared not to spread between animals and humans, and if it did, it failed to trigger any hidden mechanism in the human brain, enabling the carrier to remain oblivious to the fact that a microorganism synthesized on a distant universe was flowing calmly through his bloodstream. In any case, it made perfect sense, Wells thought with a sense of relief, because when he had injected Newton, the cronotemia virus was still in an experimental phase. It would doubtless have needed a lot of modifying before it could work on humans.
Despite everything, the Wellses kept up their anxious surveillance of the twin who had been bitten, who lived out his life in a universe where time went by more quickly than in their adopted world, exactly as it was meant to, apparently with no major disruptions. Finally, they had to acknowledge that, besides his curious scar and his phobia of dogs, the bite itself didn’t seem to have had any effect on Wells’s twin, or on the parallel worlds that made up the universe in which they had been stranded.
Relieved that was the case, they were gradually able to relax, and, as they had done prior to poor Newton’s sudden appearance, went back to their old habit of sitting by the fire and spying on other worlds purely for pleasure. With practice, they found they were able to move farther from the neighboring universes, that infinite pentagram of parallel worlds, and from the lives most similar to their own. This enabled them to connect with twins who were completely dissimilar to them. They infiltrated the ice-cold mind of a Wells who killed prostitutes by ripping their guts out, the harmonious brain of a Wells who was a pianist, the enlightened soul of a Jane who was a nun, and the farther they traveled from their adopted universe, the more unlikely their twins’ personalities became. Filled with awe, they discovered that those distant worlds contained the most miraculous notes in the universal melody. They glimpsed worlds as strange as they were wonderful, where humans had merged with the rest of Nature to create bat-men, wolf-women, and rain-girls; as well as worlds where automatons had conquered the planet, almost wiping out the human race, except for a small band of rebels who resisted valiantly under their leader, the brave Captain Shackleton; and still others where there were more colors than usual, or where men had only one eye in the middle of their foreheads, or where they could float and walk on water because the physical laws that controlled that universe were completely different from the ones they knew. A brilliant kaleidoscope of fantastical worlds Wells and Jane could describe to each other solely through metaphors and similes that only diminished the miracles they had seen.
And, very occasionally, they would watch over the Wells with the scar again, the Wells who had a fear of dogs, which none of the other Wellses suffered from in any of their parallel lives. However, in his world, everything appeared to be running smoothly: he had just published his first novel, The Time Machine, which had enabled him to live off his writing but had also embroiled him, as it had many of his twins, in an absurd rivalry with Gilliam Murray, who was as corpulent as the murderous thug who had forced them to jump through the magic hole in their own world, except that here his nickname was the Master of Time, because he had opened a time-travel company.