The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(162)
“Is that your plan for finding Emma?” he said, visibly disappointed. “Then I fear we never shall.”
“What makes you say that?” Doyle said, surprised. “I feel sure there is a doorway leading to her on the pink plain—probably very similar to the hole that you thought took you to the year 2000, and much easier to pass through than a mirror.”
Murray sighed.
“Do you want to know the whole truth about the fourth dimension?”
“Of course.” Doyle nodded excitedly.
“Very well.” Murray breathed another sigh. “Then I think you are in for a greater surprise than you bargained for.”
But wait a moment, dear reader! Whilst Murray and Doyle are embroiled in their discussion, oblivious to all that is happening around them, I can see everything willy-nilly, and I have just noticed that the hundreds of mirrors with which Murray has adorned his property have stopped reflecting what is in front of them. Instead of contemplating their own bored expressions in the looking glasses Murray had told them to watch over, the maids and footmen were seeing quite different images, strange worlds they could never have conjured in their own imaginations. One mirror revealed a valley of silky grass through which a herd of centaurs was galloping; another a huge amphibious creature, its back bristling with spikes as it bobbed on a greenish ocean; another a grey wilderness with thick, driving rain and dazzling lightning bolts, where enormous metallic beetles fought to survive; another a landscape of toadstools as tall as trees, on which caterpillars wearing waistcoats and frock coats conversed with one another; another a cluster of floating castles drifting through lilac clouds, with waterfalls flowing from them like fringes made of foam; another the dome of St. Paul’s, over which at that very moment flew a magnificent pterodactyl.
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.
33
FIFTEEN MINUTES EARLIER, DR. RAMSEY 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.