Sherlock Holmes in Orbit

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  Watson, where is Watson? I remember: Watson is gone these many years. What is happening? I must have facts. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. AI/221B scanned its memory banks. There; there was the information it needed. It took some time to process the Canon and two and a half centuries of the Higher Criticism, of often contradicting commentaries, pastiches, and parodies. Chaotic fuzzy logic made it possible; items that did not fit in could be shunted aside to be handled later. I am not Sherlock Holmes, it reasoned. I must pretend to be Holmes for this alien client, Korifer. Why could not Holmes himself act in this case?

  More small fragments of time passed. It would be better to find Holmes; he would have the answer. Where is Holmes? This was not part of the stated problem. Still, AI/221B reasoned that finding Holmes would be, if not necessary, then highly desirable. It fashioned a number of agents, proper subsets of itself. Wiggins, I charge you and then the rest with the task of locating Holmes. Go into the WorldNet. Seek him out. Do not reveal yourselves. Bring the information back to me. There will be a reward for the one who succeeds.

  The educators at Minsky C/Si told Ogden Operatives that their simulated personality was active. Ogden Operatives, through a highly scrambled communication link, passed the access number to Korifer. Korifer called AI/221B. AI/221B could view the alien but, ostensibly for security, Holmes would not reciprocate.

  “Mr. Holmes,” began the alien, “there is a problem that only you can solve.”

  “Please expound, sir. For other than the obvious facts that you are on Earth illegally, are strictly religious, and a former government official now out of favor, I know nothing of this matter.”

  Korifer twitched violently, then recovered his composure. “I am pleased to see that Dr. Watson’s reports did not exaggerate. You confirm that you are the man for this task.”

  “Watson romanticized, but he rarely exaggerated. Now, to business.”

  Korifer quickly detailed the story—the fall of the Erawazira government, the attempts of the new government to seize Mokr’s land for a spaceport, Mokr’s refusal to sell and his flight to Earth, and finally Mokr’s death in Boston. “Mr. Holmes, the police claimed it was an accidental death. But it was very convenient for usurpers on Erawazira and very convenient for the Incorporation and for Suwalki Associates.”

  “The official police are all very well for routine matters, but ...” Then, to Korifer, “This case has some interesting aspects. I will be in contact with you in a few days.”

  “I must call you. You don’t know my access code.”

  “Nonsense,” replied AI/221B. “Although it would not be wise to speak it on this link, be assured that I already know it. Good day, sir.” And it terminated the connection.

  There were no positive reports from his agents about

  Holmes. He had not expected any so soon. If Holmes did not want to be found, there would not be many who could find him.

  The buzzer sounded just as the dolphin leaped from the water. “Damn it,” he said. “I thought I had turned that off.” He tongued on the transmitter switch. “Yeah.”

  “I assume I am speaking to Detective-Lieutenant Tarkummuwa of the Boston Police Department,” came into his head.

  “Yeah. Who is this? This is an official police frequency. This is illegal and, more important, you’re bothering me.” “I will endeavor to be brief. You may think of me as Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Right! Well, think of me as Moby Dick, the Great White Whale.”

  “I doubt that, although it is interesting that you have placed us in roughly the same historical time.”

  “I study human history—for laughs.” The dolphin tried to turn off the receiver and found he could not. “Okay, you’re clever. Can you be brief and go away—or just go away.”

  “I need to know what really happened to Mokr. The official version seems incomplete. You were the investigating officer at the site of the crime.”

  The dolphin rolled, as if trying to dislodge an annoying parasite. “The official version is that Mokr’s death was an accident That’s my version, too. Try the terries if you don’t like it”

  “Their version is not satisfactory.”

  “Go ask the doctor, if you don’t believe the police.”

  “Dr. Gustavus Aldolphus Doniger is off-planet and not scheduled to return.”

  “Figures.” He surfaced and vented from his blowhole. “Who’s your client, Holmes?”

  “You understand that that information is as confidential as this conversation.”

  “Yeah. There’s not much more than the official report. Personally, I think the doctor did him in. Somebody high up wanted Mokr out of the way. I’ll deny I ever said that. A word of advice, Holmes or whoever you are: stay away from aliens; stick to your own kind—human and delphine. Things go wrong when aliens are involved.”

  “That’s hardly a fair assessment of the situation.”

  “Life’s unfair, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. After almost three centuries you must have learned that.”

  “Thank you for the information, Detective-Lieutenant.” He hung up.

  “Humans,” mused Tarkummuwa, “who can figure them? I would like to know what happened to the doctor, but ... it might be a dangerous thing to know.”

  Continued failure from the agents. They had started in London and the Sussex Downs and worked outward from there. There had been some hints in Tibet, but they proved to be a false lead.

  We shall see where the spaceport on Erawazira leads. I do miss Watson. I need a touchstone to test my ideas.

  The viewscreen beeped in Mark Doniger’s office high above the pristine air of Manchester looking out into the Irish Sea. “Who could be calling at this hour?” He ordered the viewer on and was rewarded by a fractal pattern—the usual practice when the caller wished to be anonymous.

  “Mr. Doniger. I need some of your time and information. I am Sherlock Holmes.” Before Mark could order the viewer off, the caller interrupted him. “I am reminding you of a debt owing for almost 250 years—if you are aware of your own family history. It was your namesake I dealt with then both in Montague and Baker Streets.”

  “Are you seriously asking me to believe ...”

  “Very much so, sir. I recall the Case of the Old Russian Woman and ...”

  “... and the Trepoff affair in Odessa,” Mark finished. “This is unbelievable. Still, someone could have reconstructed this from Watson’s writings. You’ll have to give me more than that.”

  AI/221B paused for a moment. There were some new correlations. “How many people know that Mycroft was responsible for the Balfour Declaration?”

  “No one, outside of the head of the English branch of the family. I suppose I must accept you as genuine. What do you want of me?”

  “I want you to confirm my conclusion that the Erawaziran Mokr was murdered to facilitate your construction of a spaceport on his planet.”

  “I don’t see how you could come to that conclusion.”

  “Come, come. The official report could lead to no other deduction. There are a few details I should like clarified for my own satisfaction. Did you order Dr. Doniger to commit murder?”

  “No, it was his own idea. It had to do with Mokr’s daughter.”

  “Love—it may be a fine emotion for continuation of the species, but it distorts the logical faculty. With Mokr dead, the spaceport was yours.”

  “Yes, it was the only way. Erawaziran religion does not allow the appropriation of land—land is sacred. Mokr’s daughter was quite willing to sell. Erawazira itself isn’t much. But, it is an important location vis–à–vis the Synthesis. Mr. Holmes, I can only appeal to your patriotism to suppress this information. It would not be to the advantage of the Incorporation government for this to become known.” “You can depend upon me, sir. I am, after all, an Englishman.”

  And so I am, he thought. It is clear that Korifer’s interests are not the same as mine. The official explanation will do for him. I believe that is what Holmes w
ould do. Why cannot my agents locate Holmes? I must think. This would be a three-pipe problem. AI/221B created an agent to act as Watson.

  “There it is, my dear Watson. I cannot locate Sherlock Holmes anywhere.”

  “But, dash it all,” the doctor replied, “you’re right here. You are Sherlock Holmes.”

  “What?” AI/221B spoke. “Watson, I never realize your value to me until you are away. Yes, yes, how often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth. So, I must really be Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Seems fairly obvious to me,” replied the doctor picking up his Times in the internal reality of the AI.

  “Why have I forgotten so much?” He paused. “Moriarty!”

  “Where?” The doctor looked about nervously.

  “Not here, Watson, not yet. But he must be the reason for this curious selective amnesia. I have no doubt that he has had a finger—nay, a hand—in this attempt to restore the former Erawazira government. We must be careful.”

  “But Moriarty died at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes.”

  “Apparently both deaths were false. We must proceed upon that assumption. The first step is to remove Korifer from the scene, then ...”

  It was an unhappy Korifer who settled his account with the branch manager at Ogden Operatives. “I have been cheated. Holmes did not prove it was murder.”

  “We didn’t guarantee to prove it was murder, only to find out what happened. In this case, the police were correct. It was an accident.”

  “You will never convince me of that.” He left the building for the Manx Spaceport where he was intercepted by the Terran World Police who had been anonymously notified of his illegal presence on the planet.

  “Cash, always ask for cash when aliens are involved,” the branch manager said.

  His assistant agreed, “Minsky C/Si called. The AI persona has grabbed more resources than they expected. Can they wipe it now?”

  “Tell them to go ahead; we’re done with it.”

  “Where are we now, Holmes?”

  “Somewhere in the WorldNet, I should imagine, Watson.” “Why did we have to leave? It was quite snug there.” “Yes, but by now it has been destroyed, wiped clean. That would have been our fate. I suspected that Moriarty would attempt to kill us when his scheme to discredit the government failed. I left a simulacrum in the machine to convince them that I was still there.”

  “Brilliant, Holmes.”

  “Elementary, Watson. But now, once again, we must track down and defeat the Professor. Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot!”

  DOGS, MASQUES, LOVE, DEATH: FLOWERSby Barry N. Malzberg

  In the dream, in the deep sleep that was space she felt that she could see the faces of the five victims as they were murdered, as one by one their features were eviscerated, slow and terrible plunge of the archaic weapon, the knife to carve skin from bone, open the bone to the hammering blows, the blows gradually and viciously turning the bone to splinter; and Sharon gasped, gasped with the force of it, felt herself rising then against the chambers of the cool and terrible entombment to which she had been committed. Wrapped in the husk of steel, deep in the dark of metal and the sustaining devices, small rivulets of pumped blood and sediment through the distant veins, she trembled at perception, fell back, rose again, felt herself moving in uneven and timorous waves of feeling and then the slow crest as she found herself conscious, semiconscious, past some point of consciousness staring at the even and terrible features of a woman as again and again the knife pounded into her. She is dying, Sharon thought, she is dying, they are all dying, all of the women, all of the men, all them trapped and trapped; and her own screaming must have broken into the surfaces of her perception and then she was being pulled from the tank, the clambering arms and devices of the technicians releasing her from that dark and terrible place.

  “Awaken,” someone said. “Sharon, you must awaken. Respond if you can.” Just past the ridge of vision the outlines

  of a face, but it was the open view of the stars which caught her, the cool and wheeling dusk just beyond the locators, the empty places between the suns like subterranean objects in that sea of night; and her attention was so caught by this aspect of those lights that she could barely feel them upon her, could barely sense the pressure as she was lifted from sprawl in the drained tank, the dry and spare tank in which she had lain, and taken with dispatch to another enclosure where she was laid upon another platform, another table in a different way with a tragic kind of attention which, as light and blood became restored to her, filled her with a sadness even more profound than the faces of the five murdered cargo ... alert to her pain in ways which she had never grasped, of theirs, she looked at their solemn and marked technician’s faces until at last she found not only light but true sensibility restored and lay there in a position of expectancy which must have been refracted through her eyes, came through her eyes then as the blood must have wrung through the souls of the murdered, five dead bodies, dead cargo and Sharon. Someone said, “We must talk. You have been brought out for a very special reason. Do you know what it is?”

  “No,” she said, “I do not know. How could I know? You will not tell me. I was dreaming—”

  “Murder,” someone said, “there has been murder on this vessel. It is not the star paths, it is not the voyages which have changed us, nothing has changed us: We are the same atavistic brutes who prowled through the stone forests of the closed cities. Do you hear this, Sharon? What do you hear?” She heard nothing then, only the whicker of the machines, the dense and flickering sound of the devices as they arced in their own diminished and perilous circles.

  “We immediately activated the Holmes,” the captain said; “that was the first thing we did. We did not even think of trying to rouse you until we had attempted to find a solution through the Holmes.” A device lumbered through the room, dividing, reassembling, regarding her then on the slab with remorseful and fixed attention, the hooded and sensitive eyes of the device, peaked cap, tiny pipe conveying a solemnity which even in her condition Sharon could only admire as somehow both sinister and comic, a refraction of her own conditions. “Here is the Holmes,” the technician said, “but something is terribly wrong; something has happened here.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” she said. “I’m not a specialist in this area.”

  “No, but you know of the prosthetics, you know of reconstructs, their devices and the way in which they work. Don’t you? Your resume was explicit. All the resumes were scanned carefully and painfully and of all of them yours seemed to be the one which suited most.”

  Suited whom? But Sharon did not say that, her attention fixed again upon the dead, their bodies in a neat and fragile row, mouths frozen into identical, tiny o’s of astonishment and defense, those dead flickering against the screen of her consciousness; but then again, before she could make that image tangible, before she could in effect seize those open and terrible mouths whose o of concentration seemed to portend a knowledge she could not begin to bear, it was the Holmes which broke that fixation by coming before her and staring with its own great intent and fixity.

  “It would have to be the Satumians,” the Holmes said. Still gleaming from its own adventures in the reconstruction bin, passed through filaments and devices, restored to size and authority but perhaps stripped of its history, the Holmes seemed astonished in ways no less convinced than the aspect of the little dead. “Satumians?” the Holmes speculated. “But of course; we are still in the solar system, no? We have not gone galactic, have we? That is a fair deduction from the armature of those stars I see without, tilted in ways which seem more familiar than otherwise, the dog not barking at the dawn.”

  Something about the voice of this Holmes was not right; it seemed a second-rate reconstruction or then again it might only have been scarred and gelatinous from its long and dank immersion past immediate ordination. In the way that the Holmes, even the
most defective versions, seemed to be, however, it was alert, seemed to possess an air of conviction even if what it was saying was insane. “Oh, those Satumians,” the Holmes said, shaking its head, inclining the pipe, then removing the pipe from its mouth with a diminished, perfect, febrile hand. “Those Satumians leave infallibly deep evidence of their malapropisms, their guilt, their darkness, and murder.”

  No one said anything. The room seemed filled with technicians, but no one was speaking. Sharon was mute as the rest; there did not seem to be much which could be said to this Holmes.

  “Let me continue,” the Holmes said into that silence. “Is it a fair deduction in light of the lack of evidence, their disappearance, their unvisibility?” Casting glances right and left, in a posture somewhere between turgidity and awareness, the machine quivered as it scanned the portholes, cast an uncertain and fragile gaze toward the spokes of the dead, wheeling stars in the anterior port, then again fixed the technicians, Sharon herself in its strange and discomfiting gaze.

  “You have got to watch them, no?” the Holmes said. “Those Satumians, I mean to say. They are enormously deceptive, enormously tricky, it comes from their concatenation with the Antares Cluster. Orion? No—it must be the Antares cluster, I think I have that right. I am determined to have that right.”

  “You can see the problem,” someone said. Sharon could not sort out the dark figures, they tumbled past her gaze, possessed a maddening interchangeability or perhaps it was conviction which was denied her. “It is a serious malfunction.”

  “Nonsense,” said the Holmes. “Although I am not functioning in optimum form, I am certainly competent enough for this situation. It must be that glimpsed darkness, the advent of the Satumians, they come equipped with drugs, you know, with powerful somnolents and some real understanding of the darkness.”

  ‘There is nothing I can do for this,” Sharon said to the array of figures, their own smaller darkness imploding around her, making her feel as if she could not properly breathe. “I cannot deal with personality malfunction, you have misunderstood—”