Holmes Entangled

by Gordon McAlpine

  “Understanding” is too definitive a word.

  Doubtless, our brains are ill made for comprehending a continually branching and multiplying reality. This may be a result of natural selection, since grasping such a concept is of little practical use. One’s life, after all, manifests as a singular line of narrative in what seems the only possible here and now, and that is all we can perceive, even if every possible outcome of every decision actually does occur somewhere in other versions of our own lives. To repurpose a term used in another context by the American philosopher William James, might we live in a multiverse? And, further complicating matters, mightn’t there be an occasional crossing of the wires, a one-in-a-trillion random quantum fluctuation, wherein a ghostly image from an alternative universe actually makes a temporary appearance in ours, with or without the silly accoutrements of a séance? The crippled version of Stanley Baldwin, for example. For no reason at all. Indeed, this may happen more often than we know, as, absent context, we may not even recognize such temporary manifestations on the crowded streets for what they actually are, mistaking them for the ordinary.

  Yes, I know this is claptrap. Of course I know.

  But I know too that existence is claptrap.

  So what do I know ?

  I tapped the knocker of the door to the unmarked Diogenes Club, located in the Pall Mall, announcing to the attendant that I was here to see Mycroft Holmes. The attendant nodded and showed me to the visitor’s room, where I was alone only a moment before Mycroft entered.

  “Well, Sherlock, I was wondering when you’d turn up here,” he said. Mycroft was still as rotund as I was lean.

  I didn’t stand to shake his hand as he closed the door behind him. Such formalities seem forced between brothers. At least, between us. Neither of us is inclined toward social niceties anyway. Nonetheless, Mycroft walked to my chair and, somewhat awkwardly, patted my shoulder. Then he crossed to the sofa across from the tea service and settled his large bulk into the cushions, arranging both the folds of the sofa and his own flesh until he was comfortable.

  “Drink?” he asked.

  “Scotch and soda,” I said.

  Mycroft reached to a side table and rang a bell.

  Within seconds, a serving man entered.

  “Two scotch and sodas,” Mycroft instructed.

  “Yes, sir.” He closed the door softly after him.

  “Is this your first visit to my club, Sherlock?”

  “You know it’s not, Mycroft.”

  “Yet still no application for membership? I’d be happy to sponsor you, little brother.”

  “I’m not the sociable type.”

  “Well, this is not a sociable club. You know that. It’s nothing but silence in every other room.”

  “Rather like a mortuary,” I commented. He laughed, unpleasantly.

  “Besides,” I said, “I suspect that when it came time for a membership vote yours would be the only one I got.”

  “I wouldn’t count on my vote either, Sherlock.”

  He looked healthy despite his excess weight. Perhaps living so completely in his mind allowed his body to balloon without deteriorating. Or, more likely, his wrinkles have simply been stretched to near invisibility. In either case, he looked little different than he’d looked twenty years before. Whereas I know my slender frame has not aged so invisibly. I no longer looked the younger brother.

  “What kind of mischief have you gotten yourself into, Sherlock?” he asked, boring into me with his steel-grey, deep-set eyes. “Leading nocturnal escapades through the London sewers with that Conan Doyle chap? Just who did you think you were evading ?”

  “I can’t say I know the names of the armed gentlemen who gave us chase. But I feel confident I know the name of the man they answer to, Mycroft.”

  “Did you come here to lodge a complaint?”

  “Can’t one simply call on his brother for the pleasure of keeping company?”

  Mycroft smiled and then guffawed. “In theory, yes. In practice, for you and me, no. That is, unless things have changed between us. Recall, Sherlock, that you never even entered my bedroom when we were boys unless you had encountered some sort of enigma for which you required my assistance.”

  “That was because you set the terms of my ever entering your room. Enigma required.”

  “And look where it’s taken you, my dear little brother,” he answered, without missing a beat.

  “Yes, many unusual places.”

  “For example, here and now. Enigma still required,” he said.

  “I can supply that. But, of course, you already know.”

  He nodded. “How was it your late chronicler described me?”

  “I don’t precisely recall, Mycroft.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, you recall everything.”

  “Indeed.” From memory, he quoted John’s published description. “The conclusions of every government department are passed to Mycroft, and he is the central exchange, the clearinghouse, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, his specialism is omniscience . . . the government began by using him as a short-cut, a convenience; now he has made himself an essential. In that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant.”

  “I’m glad John’s writing is so memorable to you, Mycroft. He’d be gratified.”

  “Memorable to the whole dashed world,” he murmured, stifling anger. “Do you realize what a nightmare such notoriety has made of my life? I can never enter a pub or restaurant without being grilled for all manner of information, from the next day’s races at Ascot to the price of gold in Shanghai.”

  “But you never enter pubs or interact with strangers anyway,” I said.

  He considered. “I suppose you’re right, Sherlock. As you so often are. But you didn’t come here to discuss, let alone to apologize for, the particular brand of notoriety with which you have saddled me, have you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Where are our whiskeys?” He glanced at the closed door as if he could conjure the footman at will.

  And, indeed, the door opened just then.

  The footman set the drinks before us.

  “Thank you,” Mycroft said, after which the footman turned and exited the room, closing the door behind him.

  I picked up my drink and held it toward Mycroft, proposing a toast: “To enigmas.” This was not the first time I’d toasted with a murderer. As previously noted, I am no unsullied hero in the manner of either the American Wild West or the romances of Sir Walter Scott. I am a professional. Expedience comes before all other concerns. Yes, lives had been taken. But it was my task to save the lives that remained threatened.

  Mycroft raised his glass as well.

  We were too distant to clink glasses, neither of us being willing to move for the other. But we both drank.

  “Did you bring it, Sherlock?”

  “It?” I inquired.

  “A rather controversial academic paper recently posted from Cambridge University to the aforementioned, frightfully rundown Islington residence, which, according to my registry sources, is owned by . . . you.”

  I took a deep breath. “If you’re referring to a fourteen-page typed document that may or may not be folded length-wise and carried now in the inside pocket of my coat, then, I suppose, the best answer I can offer is to cite recent experimental results from the vanguard of quantum mechanics that suggest not only the paradoxical conclusion that reality has no singular, independent existence but that what we perceive as real only comes into being when we observe it.”

  “The Copenhagen Interpretation,” he murmured.

  I nodded. “So, I suppose you could say that I both ‘have’ and ‘don’t have’ the said document here in my pocket, dear brother.”

  “Conditions . . .” he grumbled. He spoke disdainfully now, as if to a common peddler. “You’ve come here to bargain, eh?”

  “I refer to nothing so simple as bargaining.”

  “Everything i
s precisely that simple,” he snapped. Then he gathered himself. “That is to say, everything is negotiable, dear brother.”

  “Negotiable until it’s not,” I answered. “Such as must have been the case with young Professor Dirac and Sir Richard Gregory, his editor. Those ‘negotiations’ came to abrupt conclusions indeed. If, that is, they ever even commenced.”

  Mycroft drank, savoring the liquor as it passed down his fleshy gullet. “How did Shakespeare put it?” He placed his drink on the end table and adjusted his posture, as if for a recitation. “Sometimes,” he said, “conscience does not make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is not sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment do not turn awry and do not lose the name of action.”

  “That’s not how Shakespeare put it.”

  “Well, that’s how I put it. And it’s how the King’s government puts it.”

  I said nothing.

  He sighed and settled back into the cushions. “Oh, I will grant that it is sad indeed to lose two good Englishmen of science on the same day. Both so bright and enthusiastically forward looking.”

  I remained silent.

  “But sometimes we men of action must act,” Mycroft said.

  As my brother’s obesity makes his walking across a room something of a challenge, his claim to be a man of action might seem comically ironic. But it did not. There is nothing comical about Mycroft. Or his actions. So I changed the subject. “Frankly, I’m surprised you did not intercept this controversial document you speak of before it was delivered to my residence,” I observed. “After all, you had access to the physics department mail log.”

  “Allow me to be honest with you, Sherlock, even if by doing so I may disillusion your impression of my omnipotence.” He chuckled. “It’s really frightfully simple. Our contact in Cambridge was sick in bed last week with a case of the grippe. As the physics department had mailed nothing of interest for quite some time, his absence didn’t seem critical. So we missed that final mailing. Until yesterday. Yes, a mistake. Ah, for want of a nail and all that . . .”

  “I’ve never believed you were omnipotent, dear brother.”

  He waved away the comment. “You’re not here to talk about me, Sherlock. You’re too clever to waste my time or yours. No, you’re here to talk about the future. True?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Unless there is some complication that I don’t perceive.”

  “Complication?” I set my drink aside. “Well, the same experimental results that suggested the Copenhagen Interpretation to Bohr and Heisenberg recently suggested to the late Paul Dirac an alternative interpretation. Of course, you’re already familiar with Dirac’s postulate.”

  “Hmm . . . My memory fails me. I’d like to hear you explain this alternative, Sherlock. Yes, this will be good. I want to hear you, a man of reason, speak ridiculous words.”

  “If I speak the words then they are not ridiculous.”

  He guffawed. “Your arrogance suggests you’ve confused your true self with that fictional abomination your old doctor friend created for the pulps.”

  “I’ve confused nothing.”

  “Fine, then tell me how the universe works, little brother.”

  “Simple. There may be more than one you, more than one me, more than one of everything.” My words suggested more confidence in the theory than I truly possessed. But I’d learned long before that Mycroft tolerated no half measures. “Indeed, there may be countless iterations of all things, all existing simultaneously.”

  He chuckled. “You mean a world in which the greatest consulting detective is a German named Von Schimmel?”

  I said nothing.

  “Oh yes, our man in Cambridge returned from his illness yesterday,” he continued. “Perhaps you remember him. Each eye a different shade of green. Unusual. Unfortunately, such physical distinctions limit an agent’s prospects. In any case, who shows up in the physics department asking about the mail log? A Teutonic professor, accompanied by a woman we thereafter identified as a disguised Mrs. Watson, full of questions regarding the recent, tragic demise of poor Paul Dirac. This German is tall and lean, like you. It was not difficult to piece it all together, particularly as you’d been identified the night before upon your arrival in Bloomsbury.” He made a tsk sound and shook his head before continuing. “In the interest of constructive criticism, I must add that your characterization of the German professor sounds quite overwrought and far too reliant on cultural clichés. Sorry, dear boy.”

  Only Mycroft ever made me feel this way.

  Not even Moriarty, who I’d killed for less.

  I gathered myself, focusing on the matter at hand. With Mycroft it is important to strike back quickly and hard or not at all. “So, who’s ridiculous now?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “It’s you and your people who’ve given such credence to Dirac’s outrageous theory of a multiplicity of universes that you killed him and his editor just to stop its dissemination.” I allowed what I hoped would seem rational contempt to color my expression.

  “His assertion cannot be disproved,” he answered. “Perhaps that makes it something less than technically ‘scientific.’ But, at the same time, the assertion is enticing and seductive. So what’s an active and responsible government to do?”

  “The Copenhagen Interpretation.”

  “Yes, and that alone.”

  I took another drink.

  He sighed and somehow managed to sink even deeper into the sofa. “Dear Sherlock, this whole quantum mechanics business is without practical application for 99.999 percent of our citizens. However, the philosophical implications may not prove so rarified. Nor the moral ones. And it’s this government’s job to maintain order. Consider the implications of this question: can it be that even I am a criminal in some other universe? If such a thing were so, then why oughtn’t I to place my own well-being ahead of law, decency, and the public good in this universe as well? Do you not see the danger of such thinking among the criminally inclined?”

  “You’ve already been a criminal in this world, Mycroft. For years.”

  “Or,” he continued, ignoring my observation, “reversing the equation, if I am a law-abiding citizen in another universe, then what responsibility to the law do I have here? It doesn’t matter if this quantum branching of universes is or is not an accurate description of reality. What matters is that it may be interpreted by those inclined but not yet committed to lawlessness as license to commit crime, perversion, or even atrocities. And, worse yet, imagine what would happen to Imperial power in the colonies if the masses ever came to believe that in one universe or another they will inevitably do every possible thing under every possible circumstance, including overthrowing their British superiors? Why then would they be inclined to follow our rules here and now?”

  “The Empire thing,” I murmured. “The doomed obsession of you and yours.”

  “The Empire is not doomed, merely threatened,” he snapped. “That is why it must be deliberately handled.”

  “And this many-worlds theory . . .” I started.

  He interrupted: “Potentially catastrophic.”

  “There are Buddhists living under our rule in Burma today who have embraced just such notions for thousands of years, absent the scientific rationale,” I indicated. “And Hindus in India.”

  “Yes, and they often present authorities with grave disrespect.”

  “No doubt warranted,” I said.

  He shifted his weight among the cushions. “You have a right to your political views, Sherlock. But that’s only because the government allows it.” He stopped. “Well, we generally allow it. I suppose you wouldn’t be here now if there were no limits to what one may think or say or write. Nonetheless, you are free to criticize Imperial power because to do so has no direct cost to you. Why? Because you do not shoulder the responsibility for an empire weakened by the events of the past few decades. Believe me, it is no soiree. Fo
r this reason, I have always envied you, little brother. Serving only your own intellectual fascinations even as you cultivate your self-aggrandizement.”

  “You underestimate the value of my life’s work, brother,” I said.

  “As you underestimate the value of mine.”

  For a moment, we were silent.

  Then Mycroft sighed, as weary of the old resentments as I. “It is simple,” he said, returning to our current conflict. “The King’s government, in addition to other clear-thinking European governments who are also involved in international trade and statecraft, foresee negative consequences if seemingly ‘irrational’ thinking is ever confused with ‘modern science.’”

  I looked at him. “It’s not the ‘science’ that frightens you and others of your ilk,” I observed. “Nor criminality, nor even politically inspired upheaval.”

  Once again, his ugly chuckle. “Nothing frightens me, Sherlock. This is because our Empire, which you demean so lightheartedly, can deal with all things.”