The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(163)

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 . . .