I shrugged in acknowledgement.
“But how would any such person have known?” she asked. “Particularly if he existed in . . . well, in another world.”
I’d asked myself the same question. “Among a countless number of worlds, there would be some in which the secret identity of another Sherlock Holmes, also disguised as a Cambridge visiting lecturer named Von Schimmel, would be known, perhaps through routine means, to a crippled, never elected prime minister version of Stanley Baldwin. Of course, such scenarios are highly unlikely. However, they also would be virtually inevitable if the number of universes were large enough.”
“And Dirac’s theory proposes the number may be that great?”
“Yes.”
“But why would that Stanley Baldwin share information about your whereabouts with our Conan Doyle?” she asked.
“Mistaken identity, perhaps,” I answered. “In various alternate scenarios, Conan Doyle and I might have a multitude of relationships, many different from the one we have here. Friends, enemies, who can imagine all the possibilities? And in such circumstances they’d all be not only possible but inevitable.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I think I follow your reasoning.”
“It’s not my reasoning, but inferences from Dirac’s proposal.”
“But . . . even if all this is so, how could there be contact between such universes?”
From my reading on quantum mechanics, I had picked up a few phrases. Random quantum fluctuation, for one. The predictable, inevitable occurrence of the altogether unpredictable. In other words, unreasonable, illogical, seemingly impossible accidents. But where and when such accidents might occur is impossible to predict, as quantum mechanics plays havoc with determinism. Would that do as an answer for Mrs. Watson? Likely not, as it raises a question that offended even as adventurous an intellect as Einstein’s: does Nature play dice? And does it play with dice that are not merely six-sided but of a countless number of sides, rolling countless games and thereby every possible combination? No, Mrs. Watson was a reasonable woman. And this was not, in any ordinary sense, a “reasonable” answer, even if it could be true.
“How?” she repeated, emphatic.
“Ay, there’s the rub,” I said, having long ago discerned that quoting Shakespeare, even meaninglessly, proves a safe bet when you’ve no adequate response to a good question.
She didn’t lower her eyes from mine. “So, do you believe Dirac’s theory is true?”
“Univers parallèles?” The phrase seemed less offensive to common sense when spoken in French.
“Yes, do you believe it?”
“Believe, hmmm . . .” I no longer felt compelled to lecture Mrs. Watson on the irrelevancy of what I did or did not believe. Particularly as the question no longer felt irrelevant. So, I answered her. “Dirac’s speculation is well-argued and is consistent with scientific observation. It’s as ‘reasonable’ as the Copenhagen Interpretation. But, for all that, it is speculation. So, it cannot be taken as a fact. Even if . . .” I stopped.
“If what?”
“Even if I wish it could.”
She sat back. “Wish,” she mused. “That’s an odd word coming from you.”
Indeed, had I ever used such a light word to express anything so dark as yearning? “Well, I’m an odd man, Mrs. Watson.”
“You’re a good man.”
I wasn’t going to get into that good/bad business with her.
For a time we drank our tea in silence.
“Are you all right, Sherlock?” she asked at last.
I nodded.
She would not be put off. “Try as you might to dismiss this many-worlds business as mere speculation, it bothers you,” she observed.
“I can’t say ‘bother’ is the right word.”
“What is?”
Entices? Intrigues? Ridicules? There was no single word. “It comes to this,” I said. “Life has always seemed to me to be insufficient. Sometimes, unbearably so. Existence as nothing more than a line leading from birth to death, marked along the way by choices that inevitably eliminate far more possibilities than they can ever produce? Insufficient! And yet what else is there but for us to choose? What is that American poem about the road not taken? The poet comes to a fork. ‘I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’ Dash it all, every choice makes all the difference. Isn’t it such an American characteristic to celebrate the choosing, when the now-unknowable world that awaited the poet on the road ‘more traveled by’ is lost forever?”
“But there are good choices and bad choices, Sherlock,” Mrs. Watson observed.
“Well, there are choices that please us and choices that don’t. I’ll stipulate to that.”
“And the process of choosing is not sufficiently diverting?”
“No,” I snapped, more energetically than I’d intended. “I’m sorry Mrs. Watson. But for me it always returns to life lacking depth and breadth, being a mere line, as absent of a third dimension as those original, faked fairies in the little girls’ photographs, the ones that are all over the newspaper today.”
“But hasn’t this past week suggested that a simple, straight line may not be the case?” she surmised.
“Eureka,” I said, softly.
She smiled.
“It would please me, soothe me, if one’s true existence were a solid block of all possibilities, whether or not we perceive it as such,” I said. “After all, I have a strong instinct that I am more than just the sum of my choices. As are you, Mrs. Watson. As is everyone. We are, all of us, all possible things. Otherwise . . . a life of near infinite possibility reduced to a mere linear succession of events, why bother?”
She shifted on the bench beside me, turning more to my direction. “But being all possible things must place us sometimes on the side of evil,” she observed. “All of us. Even you, Sherlock.”
“Oh, I can’t begin to guess how often I’ve inadvertently served evil in this one straight line alone,” I observed. “Countless instances. Indeed, did I serve evil by negotiating a position with Mycroft, a murderer as vile as Moriarty? A position that cost a good man his reputation?”
“We’ve been over the Conan Doyle business, Sherlock. He’s alive.”
“Yes, but if, in another life, I’d taken a differently principled position and refused to negotiate with my brother, attempting instead to aid Conan Doyle in publishing his alternative Stanley Baldwin article and, in the process, gotten us all killed, would that have made me evil? Or even wrong?”
“No, not evil. Not even wrong. But I, for one, am glad to still be alive, here and now.”
“Yes, that mattered to me as well, Mrs. Watson.”
“I know. Thank you.”
She put her age-spotted hand on my scrawny knee. Nothing forward. Just warm, as friends do. I did not put my hand atop hers, though I knew many in this situation would do so.
Not I. Not in this life.
“In some parallel world, John would still be alive,” she observed. “Still with us.”
“Yes, some other world.”
“Sherlock, mightn’t you simply trust Dirac’s theory?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Dirac was as you are . . . a genius. True? And, since one can’t disprove his assertion, mightn’t you simply accept it? All possibilities and identities enacted, each as ‘real’ as any other. Each as real as this.”
Of course that was the appeal of the thing.
But I shook my head. “I can’t choose to believe one thing or another. It’s not who I am.”
She removed her hand from my knee. “Didn’t you famously say that when one has eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
“I may have said it, or, quite honestly, John may have conceived it and merely reported I said it.”
“Well, either way you’re Sherlock Holmes. Your intellect is unbounded.”
“Oh, I’m quite bound up.”
She ignored my dism
issal. “You’re internationally famous, accomplished, respected.”
“Yes, I enjoy all those public characterizations, but . . .”
“But what?”
I’d only come here to say goodbye. Besides, I felt emptied of words. So I shook my head, feeling finished. “No more, please.”
She set down her tea.
We sat for a long time together in silence.
That was the last time I saw Mrs. Watson.
My negotiations with Mycroft at the Diogenes Club had addressed not only the fate of Conan Doyle, who, until that morning, had posed the most immediate threat to the government’s commitment to the status quo, but also of Mrs. Watson and myself. While neither she nor I was as inclined as Sir Arthur to race to the newspapers with a good story, we two nonetheless could not be ruled out as potential hazards, according to Mycroft. After all, we’d witnessed the ends to which the government had gone to quash news of the strange manifestation at the home of Lady Vale Owen. Of course, Mrs. Watson and I had no proof of a connection between the shooting of Conan Doyle and that of the blond assassin, no proof of the government’s involvement in the overnight re-staffing of the Society for Psychic Research, no proof of a pursuit through the sewers of London, no proof of a conspiracy to murder Dirac and Sir Richard. Still, as Mycroft said, the government did not take chances with potentially dangerous ideas. Or dangerous citizens.
But he and I were brothers, after all.
And I had served the Crown well on numerous occasions, despite myself.
So he offered me exile in precisely the kind of comfortable country residence that most of the world already thought I occupied, be it in the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands, or the Sussex Downs, with the proviso that I never return to London, Cambridge, or Oxford, never entertain visitors, particularly Mrs. Watson, never communicate via telephone, telegraph, or letter, and never write or speak of the events that fill these pages. In return for my isolation, I would be left in peace and, of far greater importance to me, the same would be true for Mrs. Watson, who would be allowed to remain in the Belgravia home she had shared with John. I was prohibited from telling her any such a deal had been struck. But I’d not have told her anyway. Her peace of mind was as important to me as her physical safety.
I call this final chronicle Uncertainty, not only in reference to Heisenberg’s new theory, but also as a description of the manuscript’s own fate. Later today, these pages will be smuggled out of England. In time, they will be hidden in the stacks of a library some place far from here. It likely will be many years before they are found. By then, the name Sherlock Holmes may mean nothing. This is as I have planned since I began writing. But if the name is familiar to you who has discovered this manuscript and read to its conclusion, then I beg that before sharing it with any newspaper or publisher you confirm that Mrs. Watson of Belgravia, London, has passed on and is thereby out of all danger. Though I will not see her again in what is left of my days, numbered in single digits now that I have completed this manuscript, she is dear to me, being the nearest thing I have to family or friend.
EPILOGUE
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, 1943
It is three minutes past two o’clock in the morning.
The streets outside are silent but for the occasional caterwauling of the strays that dominate Palermo in the small hours. The private investigator sets the last page of the manuscript facedown atop the others to complete a neat pile on the open space of his cluttered desktop. He takes a deep, steadying breath. He is not tired. Rather, he feels almost overstimulated, due less to the maté he has been drinking these hours and more to the enticing possibilities of the handwritten document that has been delivered so innocently into his keeping.
The librarian slumps in the wooden chair opposite, sleeping.
“Señor Borges,” the PI says, in a voice neither soft nor loud.
The librarian’s eyes open. He sits up straighter in the chair and runs one hand through his thinning hair. “What time is it?” Borges asks, seemingly unaware that he wears a watch.
The PI tells him.
“So you’ve read the entire thing?” Borges inquires.
The PI nods, tapping the backside of the manuscript’s last page with the tip of his ring finger. “You say you’ve had the handwriting analyzed, Señor Borges? It is truly the work of Holmes?”
Borges nods. “It’s authentic.”
The PI sits back in his chair.
“I’ve researched the paper it’s written on as well,” Borges adds. “The watermark is that of a British company that went out of business in 1930.”
“Fingerprints?”
Borges leans forward, fully awakened now by his ardor to explain. “By the use of a somewhat labyrinthine social network, telephoning at great expense one acquaintance who led me to another, who led me to yet another, and so on, I eventually contacted a reliable source at Scotland Yard and learned that Señor Holmes was never fingerprinted.”
“Convenient,” the PI mutters.
“Your cynicism does not suit you,” Borges says. “It is not in your character.”
The PI decides to ignore Borges’s comment about what may or may not constitute his character. “In truth, it’s not the logistics that give me pause, Señor Borges. It’s that I have a few doubts, from my own past reading of the famous cases, that Holmes was the sort to derive such personal significance from esoteric concepts. To be troubled by them. Rather, he always seemed to me more likely to just debunk them.”
“You refer to the univers parallèles?”
The PI nods.
“I believe you’ve misread the historical Holmes.” Borges removes a folded sheet of typing paper from his inside jacket pocket. He unfolds it. Next, he takes from his shirt pocket a pair of thick glasses, which he puts on. “I’ve reread the accounts,” he explains. “Allow me to quote directly from Dr. Watson. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes says, ‘One’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature’ and in ‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’ he states that ‘Of late, I have been tempted to look into the problems furnished by nature rather than those more superficial ones for which our artificial state of society is responsible.’ In The Sign of Four he virtually anticipates the practical application of quantum mechanics, though the discipline was still decades away from development, when he says, ‘while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant.’ This is how it works for elementary particles, no? And in much the same vein, he is quoted in The Hound of the Baskervilles as follows, ‘We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination . . .’ Do you still think he is merely an exponent of materialism? Well, in The Valley of Fear, he describes his method as being far from purely observational. I quote: ‘Let me indicate a possible line of thought. It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?’”
The PI holds up his palm. “That’s enough Borges.”
“His words, not mine.” The librarian removes his glasses, returning them to his shirt pocket, and refolds the paper, placing it again in his jacket.
“It is my job to be a cynic,” the PI says. “That’s what you’ve paid me for.”
Borges shrugs in acknowledgment.
“Having said that,” the PI continues, “I admit that I am convinced of the manuscript’s authenticity. So let us turn to the reason you brought it to me. This man who stalks you, who you say shot at you . . .”
“The blond man.”
The PI leans forward, resting his forearms on his desk. “Who have you told about this manuscript?”
“No one.”
“Not even your wife?”
“I am not married.”
The PI nods. “You said before that you do not think this blond ma
n is after the manuscript merely because of its great value to publishers or collectors of rare books and authentic crime artefacts.”
“Correct,” Borges answers. “I believe my assault and the continuing threat has to do with the potentially revolutionary aspects of the univers parallèles at the core of Holmes’s manuscript. I believe there remain powerful interests who oppose the notion. In Holmes’s experience, that force was the State. But here, it could still be the Church. Or the State. Or both.”
“Fine, Señor Borges, but why is this blond man stalking you rather than simply making you a generous offer to purchase the manuscript or, failing that, stealing it from you?”
“Because, for me, there’s more than just the manuscript.”
The PI waits, saying nothing.
Borges seems to compose his words in his head before speaking them. “You see, in my dream of you, I experienced something akin to what Conan Doyle experienced in his séance.”
“A parallel . . . me?” the PI inquires.
“Yes. In my dream, the details of your entire life, including the secret murder case that has occupied your attentions here these past weeks, were known to me. This is because in the dream you were a character I had created for that very crime story. That’s right. You, the victim, and the murderer were fictions. And yet, here you are.”
“And where is this story?”
Borges shakes his head. “In this world, there is no such story. In this world, you and your murder investigation are as real as I am. But in another world . . .”
The PI grunts his disapproval.
Borges stands and begins pacing the small office as he speaks. “Naturally, I related my strange dream to my friends at the Café Tortoni, where I take my coffee. I trusted them. But perhaps one of them was a spy for the same brand of authorities who objected to Conan Doyle’s experience more than a decade ago. Perhaps one of them is an Argentinian Mycroft Holmes. In any case, I am now marked. And it should be no surprise. After all, Poe merely suggested the possibility of alternate worlds and lost his life for doing so. Conan Doyle merely attempted to propose that a living, prospering figure in his world had been observed through inexplicable means to be crippled in another, ‘parallel world.’ And what happens? Conan Doyle’s reputation must be destroyed to spare him assassination. And my dream goes farther. It suggests the unthinkable.” He stops.
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