“Ah, me,” the Holmes said. “I resist dysfunction, it crawls at the comers, but it is of no account, I refuse to submit.” Serenely it shrugged, making some precarious inner adjustment, then pitched to the floor to lie in a small concave of bolts and spokes. “It is all part of a larger plot,” it murmured from this awkward posture. “When I have worked this through, I will give you a full and final explanation of the crime. Five of the cargo died, eviscerated in peculiar and horrible ways and no means by which to deduce the killer until the important clue of the Satumians emerged to make the situation contemplative. I am on my way thus to that full and final explanation, even as I discuss, even as you stare, I am focused upon the source, the meaning, the motive of the murder, I meet the situation in the least glib and most positive fashion, I am, I am—”
The device trembled then into silence, its handsome, anachronistic features—trust the technicians to put into place a device created from fiction for trouble on the starpaths— were late Victorian as Sharon had heard although they struck her as anarchic 24th, the purest and finest manifestation of contemporaneity, a contemporaneity which had landed her in the bowels of this craft in deep sleep and then emergent to the star channels, yanked from blank composure to this kind of horrified attention, this endless, wordless stare.
“You see the problem,” the technician said; this must have been the captain, head technician as they could be called, the determinant device which regulated the sleep, timed the procession of the slow, stalking figures which maintained the craft during passage and which, confronted by murder, was confronted as well by responsibilities as unpleasant as they were imminent. “We have five cargo dead,” this technician said, “murdered in their entombment, and a malfunctioning Holmes. It has gone mad, as mad in this case as a reconstruct can, or possibly this is a new form of disrepair, but in any case the situation is serious, it is massive, and that is why we have called upon you. Inspect the Holmes so that it may function and produce the assassin or assassins so that the voyage may properly resume.”
This seemed a long presentation from a technician, captain or no, as like an eclipse the Holmes rose to pass before it and said, “You need attend to none of this. There is nothing amiss with my ratiocinative processes and in due course we will evict the murderer. Or murderers. It may well be invading Satumians,” the Holmes said, “or then again it may be some kind of extra-solar invasion. We will investigate all of these possibilities carefully, even reverently I might point out.” It leaned forward in some posture of confidentiality and attention. “You do understand,” the Holmes said directly to Sharon. “We must deal with imminence no less than the captains and kings who chart our way in these star courses must eventually depart.”
“Yes,” Sharon said, “I can see this, understand this,” although of course she understood nothing at all; it was not her posture to understand but only to refract these pieces of information and terror filtering uncontaminated through the screen of her sensibility. Why me? she would have said, why has this become my situation? You could have aroused any of a hundred in the tanks to this same conclusion. But of course this self-pity was as arbitrary as that unmade decision, it was all arbitrary which was, in fact, the point: Random selectivity would only induce an impression of uniqueness in the survivor, and so she regarded the cluster of technicians, the impenitent and rationalizing Holmes, sturdy devices come to her for assistance if not comfort, and so she spoke with what she hoped was the firmness of the technician, not the disconnection of this woman, this object tom from the tanks to be thrust into impossible confrontation through some portholes of the sensibility which were opaqued, impenetrable as the mystery by which she was surrounded.
“I’m not sure,” she said, “of any of this, I am unable to come to terms with this circumstance.” For a century, she wanted to say, but the explanation would have been impossibly laborious and possibly untrue, for more than a century she had lain in the guts of the starcraft, immune to waste and death, indifferent to the stars as well as any sense of her own mortality, the slow reckoning crawl of chronology, sunk into the An tares passage and then the dreams of the murdered cargo, all of them were cargo, that was how they were listed on the manifest, and finally, from those wrenching hallucinations the sudden spokes of light in the brain, the brain pierced to split open, into that large open shell of light the cascading force and she, Sharon, homo erectus then and led into this antechamber, the grasp of the technicians, the malfunctioning Holmes, the stains of the evicted dead still thick upon the floor, that dried frosting of blood an indication of the force unleashed in these spaces, the deadliness of that force. Oh, death was deadly, all right. Who here would dispute that? Who other than one assailed by the madness and inconstancy of the pure murderous act would feel differently? The heavy wedge of inanition, splitting Sharon as the light had split her brain and nowhere, nowhere at all to clutch, to seize as an area of remonstrance, of circumstance.
“We immediately reconstructed the Holmes,” the head technician repeated. “Without favorable result, as you can see.”
“What did you expect?” Sharon said. “Reconstructs are faced with the same circumstances as any of us, they must deal circumstantially without any real sense of transition, there are limits beyond which they cannot rationally be expected to function, they are just like us. They are—”
“Yes,” the head technician said, “of course, that is so. This is exactly the kind of material we need to hear from you, the advisements which we seek. Perhaps the wrong reconstruct was chosen: perhaps the Archer or the Wolfe would have been better. The Marlowe has been dysfunctional from the outset; we could not obtain clearance for use. The Poirot failed to properly release when we sought it for help in the aftermath of the Holmes disaster.”
“Summons and evictions,” the Holmes said. It appeared to have dissolved into some abstracted, tunneled version of itself, features gone sodden with the implosion of thought or perhaps it was merely thought’s simulation, impulses like waves to carry it from one blunted realization to the next while Sharon and the head technicians and the technicians beyond stared and stared. “Evictions,” the Holmes said again. “Summonses for help.”
“Irrationality,” said the head technician. “From the start we have seen this kind of irrationality and irrelevance. It is a difficult thing to counter, but that is why you have been summoned.”
Maintenance, Sharon could have said. I’m a technician, too, but it would have been, was useless, fruitless mumble as the Holmes had mumbled in its unrecovered dream of darkness, as the cargo had mumbled when they were snatched to
die, as the cargo themselves lay in tumbled jigsaw in the abscess of false memories, the bodies unremoved in this version of disaster and likely to stay so, to soak the decks with running blood for they were evidence and one should not touch evidence, was that not correct? Once its madness had abated, if this were possible, the Holmes would want to see that evidence, examine those bodies wherever they were, plumb the dried source of that drier blood and discover the killer, the assassin from whom the Holmes itself would, until such discovery, never be safe: sensitive and vulnerable reconstruct, hampered by its madness, unsafe because it walked as it was made, designed to walk with the dogs and masques of murder.
The bodies, gelatinous and grotesque, the bodies lay there still, before the technician, before the gaze of the Holmes. “I thought they were gone,” Sharon said in confusion, “I don’t want them, I don’t want to see them. We have to put them somewhere.” She blinked, and saw the corpses no more. They had perhaps been illusory, perhaps it was all one austere and difficult illusion, but no, still the technicians stared at her, intense and gaining interest as she inspected the place where the bodies had gone.
“No,” said the Holmes with a sudden smile, smiling as it rose, smiling as it pulled harshly at the sleeves of its clothing. “No, we must not touch them, they must not be moved.” The Holmes itself pacing now, those Victorian appendages stiff with a military rigor,
moving as stiffly then to stand beside Sharon, to regard her with a studied sleuth’s compassion. “You are frightened of your own ignorance, your own possibility,” the Holmes said. “You are a clever and responsive person, but it is of your own ignorance that defeat has been made. But be of good cheer,” the Holmes added, “do not be concerned now. I am accustomed to working alone, but if you would like to accompany me throughout this investigation, I will be glad to explain to you my methods of deduction. Logic is foremost; no matter how unfortunate the circumstances in which we find ourselves, logic is our watchword and our key.” As it spoke it seemed to be searching itself for something. Its body shivered minutely, but the voice did not falter. Sharon took a step away, closer to the blood and then in skittish reversal stepped back again, closer to the Holmes. Maybe I should cease junctioning too, Sharon thought, maybe then they would wake up someone else and I could go back to sleep.
She had apparently spoken aloud; the Holmes was staring at her, the technicians less obviously. “There will be no rest,” the Holmes said sternly, “until logic is applied—and remorselessly, for this is a situation which demands relentless action, the action of logic, the cold application of thought. Are you with me?” said the Holmes to Sharon, who stared back without answer, as silent as the bodies lying past motion, past her help or any other, past the absurd and vaguely threatening gaze of the Holmes extending now to Sharon its hand, the touch as lifeless as the corpses, as alien as the darkness past the portholes, as comfortless as the Holmes’s resumed subsonic mutter of Satumians and drugs, symptoms of a madness past her aid or comprehension and that comprehension and absent aid her own and only salvation. This is insane, Sharon thought, and in the thinking took the Holmes’s hand. Which squeezed hers, radiating a fractured force and intelligence, a consuming determination as the Holmes squeezed again and said, “You are the assassin.”
“You,” the Holmes said again, “you are the assassin, you did this. All of this is you. You did not dream those five murdered cargo but circumvented through an illusion of dream the actual nature of the murder, your own culpability. You lied to yourself, don’t you understand that? In your suspended stupor you were roused to half-consciousness, fixed or feared necessity; you stole from your tank and into the empty and dark spaces of the sleeping craft and taking from their cache the weaponry of descent you went to those coffinlike enclosures at random and—already working from your inference of coffins—you killed them, one by one by one, killed them to preserve your own stupor, to blunt your own arousal and having done so, having evicted life through this terrible calumny you put down your weapons, called for the removal crew and then escorted yourself back to your own coffin where you lay until, having set the signals for your own selection, you were brought to consciousness and taken here.”
Sharon said nothing. Beside her, around her, the technicians did not move.
“Well, of course,” the Holmes said, “I perceived all this instantly, there is little that can be concealed from a skilled reconstruct confronted by such evidence. It was an accident, a failure of circuitry more than a failure of the soul; you will not be dealt with nearly so harshly if you will only accept your culpability now. You do, of course.” The Holmes squeezed her hand again in a comforting way, gave a coy and remonstrative wink. “Isn’t that so?” it said. “Isn’t this the annealment of dogs, masques, love, deaths, flowers? What do you think, would it not go easier for you if you were to make that concession which already has been accepted by your soul?”
Well, yes. It would go easier for her, everything would go easier for her if she were only to make that concession, and Sharon felt the irresistible lurch, the leap toward full expulsion of her own criminal guilt and she choked on it, choked like vomit on that expulsion, that confession, feeling it rear against her and—”No,” she said, “no it wasn’t that way at all. This is more of the malfunction; you are just trying to blame me for that which is not my fault, not my responsibility. I didn’t,” she said, “I didn’t, I didn’t, but her response was feeble, whisked improvidently within her own consciousness and she felt huge and impermeable the vast tug of the Holmes and then the head technician upon her as she was guided slowly toward the anterior port. “I didn’t mean it,” she said, “it wasn’t something I wanted, it wasn’t what I meant; it was the awfulness, the darkness which I could not bear, I was not meant to be here, this was not meant to happen or at least not happen to me,” and she continued to protest all up and down the long and febrile corridors of her resistance as she was carried here and carried there, carried hither and back in the vast and sculpting spaces of the unknown, intolerable craft, expelled at last finally into what could have been space, the austere and unimpeachable spaces of Whitechapel in a paralyzing winter dawn and the monstrous hands upon her no longer those of the reconstruct Holmes, the soulless and safe technicians but of that most drastic prince of reconstructions and excavations, exculpation and revenge as he tore her here, tore her there, tore and lovingly removed from those cavities themselves like the blackness between the stars the most precious and secret parts of her, under the implacable witness of a Holmes who could not save her because he—like the ship, the crew, the cargo, the sunken and dread passage itself—had been given neither blood nor life under that tent of night, that reconstruct of life under the large tent of lost plausibility and prayer.
YOU SEE BUT YOU DO NOT OBSERVEby Robert J. Sawyer
I had been pulled into the future first, ahead of my companion. There was no sensation associated with the chrono-transference, except for a popping of my ears which I was later told had to do with a change in air pressure. Once in the twenty-first century, my brain was scanned in order to produce from my memories a perfect reconstruction of our rooms at 22IB Baker Street. Details that I could not consciously remember or articulate were nonetheless reproduced exactly: the flocked-papered walls, the bearskin hearthrug, the basket chair and the armchair, the coal scuttle, even the view through the window—all were correct to the smallest detail.
1 was met in the future by a man who called himself Mycroft Holmes. He claimed, however, to be no relation to my companion, and protested that his name was mere coincidence, although he allowed that the fact of it was likely what had made a study of my partner’s methods his chief avocation. I asked him if he had a brother called Sherlock, but his reply made little sense to me: “My parents weren’t that cruel.”
In any event, this Mycroft Holmes—who was a small man with reddish hair, quite unlike the stout and dark ale of a fellow with the same name I had known two hundred years before—wanted all details to be correct before he whisked Holmes here from the past. Genius, he said, was but a step from madness, and although I had taken to the future well, my companion might be quite rocked by the experience.
When Mycroft did bring Holmes forth, he did so with great stealth, transferring him precisely as he stepped through the front exterior door of the real 22IB Baker Street and into the simulation that had been created here. I heard my good friend’s voice down the stairs, giving his usual glad tidings to a simulation of Mrs. Hudson. His long legs, as they always did, brought him up to our humble quarters at a rapid pace.
I had expected a hearty greeting, consisting perhaps of an ebullient cry of “My Dear Watson,” and possibly even a firm clasping of hands or some other display of bonhomie. But there was none of that, of course. This was not like the time Holmes had returned after an absence of three years during which I had believed him to be dead. No, my companion, whose exploits it has been my honor to chronicle over the years, was unaware of just how long we had been separated, and so my reward for my vigil was nothing more than a distracted nodding of his drawn-out face. He took a seat and settled in with the evening paper, but after a few moments, he slapped the newsprint sheets down. “Confound it, Watson! I have already read this edition. Have we not today’s paper?”
And, at that turn, there was nothing for it but for me to adopt the unfamiliar role that queer fate had dictated I m
ust now take: Our traditional positions were now reversed, and I would have to explain the truth to Holmes.
“Holmes, my good fellow, I am afraid they do not publish newspapers anymore.”
He pinched his long face into a scowl, and his clear, gray eyes glimmered. “I would have thought that any man who had spent as much time in Afghanistan as you had, Watson, would be immune to the ravages of the sun. I grant that today was unbearably hot, but surely your brain should not have addled so easily.”
“Not a bit of it, Holmes, I assure you,” said I. “What I say is true, although I confess my reaction was the same as yours when I was first told. There have not been any newspapers for seventy-five years now.”
“Seventy-five years? Watson, this copy of The Times is dated August the fourteenth, 1899—yesterday.”
“I’m afraid that is not true, Holmes. Today is June the fifth, anno Domini two thousand and ninety-six.”
“Two thou—”
“It sounds preposterous, I know—”
“It is preposterous, Watson. I call you ‘old man’ now and again out of affection, but you are in fact nowhere near two hundred and fifty years of age.”
“Perhaps I am not the best man to explain all this,” I said. “No,” said a voice from the doorway. “Allow me.” Holmes surged to his feet. “And who are you?”
“My name is Mycroft Holmes.”
“Impostor!” declared my companion.
“I assure you that that is not the case,” said Mycroft. “I grant I’m not your brother, nor a habitué of the Diogenes Club, but I do share his name. I am a scientist—and I have used certain scientific principles to pluck you from your past and bring you into my present.”
For the first time in all the years I had known him, I saw befuddlement on my companion’s face. “It is quite true,” I said to him.
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