Warlock Holmes--The Sign of Nine Page 9

  I spend the whole day flying above the mud and the cool surface of the pond. My eggs are fertilized—that’s a bit of a surprise. But it’s all right. I know it is something I’m supposed to do. I deposit them in the cool water. The day is almost over now, and the mud has become dry and cracked.

  I can feel my body slowing down. That’s all right. My eggs are laid; my job is done. My wings can no longer lift me. My legs won’t hold me up. I let myself fall into the mud. The sun is going down. So am I. A buzzing confusion grows in my simple little mind. I can hardly move at all anymore. I can’t even breathe.

  And then, with a sudden wrenching wave of nausea, I’m back with the boy. I have ridden along as the demon gave him an entire second life.

  The life of a mayfly: one day in August.

  “But that was hardly a life at all,” says the youth. “You planned to cheat me.”

  “And you, it seems, have succeeded in cheating me,” replies the demon. “I am fading. My powers wane. There is no point in spending them to sustain myself, so I shall set them to another purpose. I gave you the life you would have had for serving me well. Now here is one more, because you have served me so cruelly. Goodbye, James Moriarty. Since you have left me no way to save myself, I shall ruin us both.”

  Oh, thank whatever gods may be that my dream does not show me the entirety of James Moriarty’s second payment. Yet I see enough to understand why Moriarty becomes the man he does.

  He goes through the agony of being born. Human, this time, or something very like it. The eyes are bigger, the fingers longer. His kind have very spare frames and no hair at all. By God, the things they’ve invented! The wonder of their cities! The strangeness of the vehicles that take them to the stars!

  The babe Moriarty is too young to understand exactly what happens to his mother and why he finds himself suddenly in the care of people who… don’t. His race has a factory-like method of raising children. He grows to near-adulthood in a loveless system and it is no surprise to me when he lashes out against it—when he finally performs the transgression his society was waiting for. At last, they have an excuse to punish him. At last, they can give him a job everybody wants done, but nobody wants to do.

  His schooling takes on a new focus. He is taught how to fly a spacecraft and how to maintain it. He is taught how to focus his attention and he is given a series of drugs and operations to ensure that he cannot help but do so. He is taught about loyalty and duty. He’s promised that he will be provided for and one day retire with the thanks of his people. Then, when they think he is ready, he is loaded into a small craft and launched into space.

  The shuttle flies for six years.

  Any wonder I feel at the accomplishments of his race dims, day by day, as we pass through the empty void. As the months go by, the stars outside the windows shift. The view is constantly changing and yet, always horribly the same.

  Then finally comes that happy day he docks with a vessel bigger than any building I’ve ever seen. The woman who meets him is ancient, and so excited she can barely speak. Indeed, she hasn’t had much practice—she’s the only creature that lives here. She shows him the captain’s chair and how to work the controls. She tells him how to aim the solar sails and how to feel the pull of a new star as you leave the push of the old. She shows him the strange turbines that power the thing when the stars are too distant and cautions him not to allow this too much. She shows him the machines that give him food and air and water and warmth and hold physical atrophy at bay. She speaks of their quirks and what must be done to keep them working. She tells him the day will come when he will not want them to keep working, when he hopes they will break or thinks of breaking them himself.

  But this is expressly forbidden. He has a job to do.

  When she steps into the six-year shuttle, she seems so happy that I fear her ancient heart will fail. Whether it does or not, I will never know. The craft flies away, with either the smiling old woman or her corpse. The creature that is now Moriarty is alone, in command of his ship.

  The society he is from has discovered something called “sub-actuality quantum transfer”. They’ve discovered a way to move energy—even mechanical force—from one atom to another. This is accomplished slightly outside reality—just “underneath” the known fabric of the universe. The kinetic force of this huge, heavy ship is being robbed from it, to power the view-screens and vehicles of thousands of people back home.

  This technology has only one flaw: intent. The energy used by all those people back on the surface of their planet will be purposefully used, therefore it must be purposefully generated or the transfer will fail. Otherwise, I am sure they would be robbing motion from some faraway moon, dragging it slowly back until it crashed into the planet it orbited. Hence, the strange work sentence Moriarty received. Hence the surgeries to hone and focus his will. Day after day, for fourteen-hour shifts or more, the Moriarty creature sits in his captain’s chair, turning the great ship this way and that. He anchors his path to one star, then the next, his razor-sharp attention focused on the blackness before him and the points of light all around. With intense purpose he flies the ship back and forth, all around the galaxy. It doesn’t matter where he goes, only that he does not stop and that he never travels anywhere he doesn’t mean to go.

  Day after day, in the captain’s chair, eating the same food—designed for nutrition, not for taste, with nobody to keep him company and nothing to hope for but the day he can return home to enjoy some of the energy he’s producing. The ship’s computer does its best, but despite possessing medical technology that dwarfs my own, it cannot possibly keep him alive for as long as the other members of his race.

  Probably not even three hundred years.

  Slowly, those years creep by. Back and forth, through the blackness, as the stars grow slowly familiar. His eyes lose their focus and his skin becomes a wrinkled, pallid coat over protruding bones.

  Until finally, the six-year shuttle returns and a nervous young man steps out.

  The love and happiness the Moriarty creature feels is so overwhelming it almost breaks my heart. It is not only that his duty is done—not only that this youth is his deliverance—it’s much more than that. He looks with the eyes of one who has sinned and repented, upon the face of one whose sin is new. He does his best to help the lad. He uses all the cogent thought he can muster explaining how the food-replicator works and how not to overtax it. This ship is the only world he knows and he explains the entirety of that world to the creature that must now inherit it. Only then, when the last shaking bit of advice is drained from his enfeebled mind, does he finally make his farewells and step away from his captain’s chair.

  The craft flies for six years.

  He finds himself staring forward, day after day, willing himself to fly in the direction he is going. It is habit. He’s not used to the fact that his intent does not matter anymore.

  How happy he is to set his trembling foot on the orbital station. He returns with the air of a conquering hero. He expected gratitude—and it is delivered—but the pity that alloys it is a surprise to him. He has a little cabin waiting on the planet below, to ease his twilight years. It’s on a mountainside. There are trees.

  They tell him not to go there yet. Not until his body is accustomed to the gravity. Not until the countless pathogens he’s been sequestered from for the last few centuries can be safely reintroduced to his tissues.

  He doesn’t listen. None of them ever do.

  As soon as he can, he’s bound for the planet’s surface. He wants to know what fresh air is like. He wants to feel water made not from his own recycled sweat, but from melting snow that fell from an open sky.

  He cannot help himself.

  If he had been more careful, his wasted old body might have afforded him a decade or two of comfortable decline to pay him back for all his long hours of labor. But nobody returning from a captaincy on the quantum fleet ever has the will to wait. It’s why the company only has to keep fou
r cabins. The rewards afforded to the returning workers are lavish, and yet the cost of providing them is never high.

  He’s dead within the month.

  * * *

  And with a sickening lurch, James Moriarty is back inside James Moriarty. He stumbles and falls. He’s not accustomed to his thick, strange fingers and his own bizarre, unnecessary hair. This nineteen-year-old lad has just lived 338 extra years. No time has passed in the reality he left, yet he has existed long enough to have forgotten he ever was another creature before the one that just died. He doesn’t remember himself or why the deepest, strangest shadow in the room is using its final breath to laugh at him, as nothingness creeps in to claim it.

  * * *

  Though he is my enemy, I cannot help but pity James Moriarty. It’s clear the demon’s double payment was a gift of exceeding cruelty. Moriarty knows better than any living man what time really means, and how it swallows us. Every night he reads, feverishly striving to understand even one of the millions of human lives that have been lost to time. He can’t do it. He can’t feel what they felt, or know what they knew. But he understands this: someday his life will be lost in the fog of ages, too.

  The demon has ruined him.

  Yet it has also made him. It has instilled him with a purpose. Every trick he’s learned in the three lives he’s lived will be applied to the same problem: the finality problem.

  Though it could not possibly have known or intended it, the demon has given humanity exactly what it most fears: one lonely human mind, capable of destroying our world.

  THE ADVENTURE OF BLACK PETER BLACKGUARD MCNOTVERYNICE

  I CANNOT, IN ANY HONESTY, CLAIM I WAS ASLEEP.

  Then again, the deplorable state in which my mind languished can in no way be compared to wakefulness. I hovered in that silken twilight I’d come to love so well as the seven percent solution suffused my blood. Each beat of my enfeebled heart sent a new rush of wonder against my senses, like waves lapping some unseen midnight shore.

  I was sure I heard the crying of birds and the whish of fleshy wings in the darkness above my head. But no, I came to realize. Not birds. Dinosaurs. With long beaks in conic heads, screeching with avian stupidity from one to another. It made me want to laugh. Instead I drifted off to something like sleep again.

  I heard a friendly voice say, “Well, go on then. Let’s see if you can do it. Transfix the pig,” followed by a grunt and a thump, a cry of dismay and a burst of laughter. Several more thunks and thumps and outcries followed, I think. I can’t be sure, because I was distracted by six phantoms of smoky light who were trying to tell me their secrets. Only, they had no voices. The dead seldom do. Yet I could not help but be moved by the strange earnestness with which they leaned towards me and failed to make themselves heard.

  “It is impossible,” moaned a gloomy voice. “That is solid brick. It is not reasonable to transfix a pig in such a manner.”

  “Ha!” a hearty voice replied. “Torg can do it! Grrrrrah!”

  There was a sudden crash, so violent I would swear it made my bed jump off the floor for a second.

  “Well done!” the friendly voice cried. “I say, you’ve transfixed the hell out of it!”

  This was followed by a roar of triumph and a series of other thumps, each more violent than the last. My bed bumped and skipped this way and that. Judging by the supportive cheers, each thump must have signified a successful transfixation. Transfixion? Transfixment? I could not bring the proper term to mind. I didn’t care.

  There was this ancient queen, you see, and I think she wanted to kiss me. But whenever she leaned towards me, we drifted apart faster than we came together. Through the diaphanous haze of my dreaming, I could hear that the miserable voice was disappointed it hadn’t managed a successful transfiction yet.

  “Try another wall, Lestrade,” the friendly voice suggested. “Only the front one is brick. The inner ones should be easier, eh? Let’s start you off small and work up to the challenge. Here…”

  I had the impression that the owner of the miserable voice did not crave lesser successes and did not care to be pandered to. Nevertheless, he must have agreed to make an attempt, for the next thump was accompanied by the squeal of nails pulling free from the wall above me, the crackle of splintering wood and a sudden deluge of shattered plaster. I opened my eyes just in time to see two feet of blood-slicked steel slide through the wall above my head. Sudden, unwelcome sobriety intruded itself into my mind—a fact I chose to protest in the only manner available to me.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiieeeeeeee-aaaaagh!”

  “Ha! Sounds like Watson’s up,” noted Holmes, from the other side of the wall.

  “Well…” said the ponderous yet thoughtful voice of Torg Grogsson. “Maybe…”

  “By the gods! I hadn’t thought of that!”

  A few moments of silence followed, then tentative footsteps could be heard in the corridor. My door creaked open and Holmes peered in, gave a sigh of relief and announced, “No, it’s all right! It’s gone through straight above him. Good morning, Watson! Sleep well?”

  “Not particularly. What the deuce is this, Holmes?”

  “Harpoon,” he replied, matter-of-factly.

  “And why have I been nigh-on murdered with it?”

  “Don’t be dramatic, Watson. That was never our intent. This is merely an experiment to assist Grogsson and Lestrade in the solution of a case. We’re transfixing piggies! All very scientific, you know. All very deduction-based. If you take a moment to reflect on it, I’m sure you’ll want to offer your congratulations on how clever we’re being.”

  I was less sure. Wriggling out from under the shaft of Holmes’s wall-piercing weaponry, I threw on my slippers and bustled down the corridor to see what my friends had done to my sitting room.

  A successful transfixation.

  I was not well pleased.

  The bloody carcasses of two pigs hung pinned to the front wall by a pair of ancient harpoons. The act had clearly been carried out more than twice, however, judging by the series of jagged holes that looked down onto Baker Street. It seemed that not only was Torg Grogsson capable of powering a pig-laden spear through a solid brick wall, he was also capable of pulling it out again and repeating the process—partly to demonstrate that such an act was possible and partly because it was the single most fun thing he’d ever been asked to do in the pursuit of police work. A third pig hung from a still-quivering harpoon against one of the interior walls, next to the somewhat sheepish-looking Inspector Lestrade.

  “Ah…” he said. “Yes… well… Good morning, Watson.”

  “Really? Is it?”

  He shrugged. “Compared to some people’s. For example, you’re having a much better morning than Captain Peter Carey.”

  “True, Lestrade, very true,” said Holmes. “Of course, Watson was only six inches away from having a somewhat similar one. Still, a miss is as good as a mile, eh? Now that you’re up, you should join us, Watson. Hurry now! Get dressed! We’re off to Woodman’s Lee!”

  “Where is that?” I inquired.

  “Near Forest Row, out in Sussex.”

  “And why are we going?”

  “New case,” said Grogsson.

  “An exciting new case,” Holmes agreed. “Now, while Watson’s getting ready… is anybody in the mood for bacon?”

  * * *

  We drove out to the house of Peter Carey, but did not go inside. Apparently, the man himself had rarely done so either. Though it appeared comfortable, Carey had preferred to spend most of his time in a small brick shed he’d built for himself. He called it “the cabin” and had decorated it in nautical style. It was towards this small building that we directed our steps.

  My first impression of Captain Peter Carey was not a favorable one. I swung open the door to his shed to find him staring directly at me with an expression of perfect rage, as if he’d like nothing better than to pick me up and hurl me across the lawn. Not that he was going to. He was, after all, stone d
ead. He’d been impaled through the chest by a ten-foot whaling harpoon and pinned to the wall behind him. His feet dangled just a few inches above the floor.

  Incredulous, I ducked under the harpoon and went up on my tiptoes to examine him. In life, he’d been an utter brute; that much was clear. He was a man of prodigious size and, though he had a large paunch, his physical strength must have been profound. Nor did he look like he was unaccustomed to employing it. His teeth were bared in a furious grimace, which—even in death—seemed to imply he was about to lunge forward and grab you. He had wiry black hair, shot with gray at the sides. He was one of those people who made one eyebrow do the work of two; a thick, bushy line of black hair shaded both eyes and did little to dispel his thuggish air. He wore leather boots, a Greek fisherman’s hat, a sailor’s sweater and tough canvas trousers.

  Vladislav Lestrade stepped forward to make the introductions. “Dr. Watson, meet Peter Carey, ex-captain of the steam sealer Sea Unicorn, better known in the seagoing community as Black Peter. To those who know him well, he was Black Peter Blackguard. To those who were forced to endure his company on a daily basis, he was Black Peter Blackguard McNotVeryNice.”

  “Ah,” I said. “So, his character was…”

  “About what you’d expect from looking at him,” Lestrade confirmed. “As a captain, his reputation was that of an utter tyrant. His tempers were famous, especially when he’d been drinking, which seems to be…”