Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (21 page)

“This is all some sort of construct?” said Holmes.

“Exactly. We are inside a machine mind. Via an interface, I can insert my consciousness directly into it. It is a completely immersive experience. For instance, I can feel the heat from the fire in the grate. The breeze through the window carries with it the odours of coal fires, undercut with horse manure.”

“Can you die here?” I asked.

“No, Doctor, I cannot, but please, keep your revolver to hand if it makes you feel at ease.”

Feeling suitably chastened, I laid my pistol on the table. “So, what are we?” I asked. “If we are not men?”

“You are the literary work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish physician of your time. His stories about you were considered some of the greatest ever works in the field of crime fiction. To many of my race, they still are. I can give you access to his biography, if you so wish?”

“If you created us, can we not also meet our maker?” said Holmes.

“Not quite. Not yet. That is partly why I am here. The entire canon of your stories resides in the Aleph—the machine mind— but it is so much more than that. It is a consciousness in its own right.”

Holmes sat forward, intrigued.

“Is it self-aware?”

“Yes. They are commonplace in our culture. My university alone has six hundred. This one is solely dedicated to the works of your people. It has taken all the information regarding yourselves, stories and otherwise, and along with all available historical data of the period, extrapolated an environment for you to live in.”

Something akin to a smile crossed the Curator’s face.

“The result of which, is you are not bound by your stories anymore, Mr. Holmes. You are... chaotic variables. Your lives are your own.”

This sounded too good to be true.

“Why would you do this for us? To what end?”

“By observing you, we hope to learn what mankind was like. We shall know them by their works.”

“So, we are exhibits in a zoo!” I said.

“Not at all. Many of the others do not even suspect their world is any different from the way it has always been.”

If this was meant to put me at my ease, it did not work.

“Others?”

“Other works of fiction, Watson,” said Holmes. “Like the observant Mrs. Darcy and our missing timetraveller?”

“The works of Jane Austen and Herbert George Wells.” replied the Curator. “However, some of them, like yourselves and Mrs. Darcy, have begun to perceive the changes. You are not the only ones. Interestingly, they are characters who are free thinkers; daring, even dangerous. They are also unexpectedly expanding the remits of the program and pushing at the boundaries of their fictional worlds, crossing over from one to another. The Aleph accommodates the shift, but not without some discomfort.”

“So I’ve discovered,” I said.

“If they remain too long out of place, the Aleph will attempt to acclimatise them into their new world. Blend them in, so their presence is not so conspicuous.”

“It’s not going quite as planned, though, is it?” said Holmes. “That other fellow who looked half scared to death. He had more of the engineer than the academic about him.”

“Yes. Which is why I am here,” said the Curator. “Occurrences of migration are rising, and my university faculty faces a difficult choice. One that is not solely ours to make, but yours also. All who are like you.

“On the one hand, the Aleph can shut down and reinitialise all of the fictional worlds, but with new restrictions. Your awareness for one, would be purposefully limited.”

“Lobotomised,” I said.

“In a manner of speaking. It would also render our study moot if you were so constrained. The other choice, and the one favoured by my colleagues and myself, is to let things go on as they are. More so, in fact. We would let migration continue unrestricted for those with a mind to travel. There would just be some checks and balances to ensure the rules of internal logic may be stretched, but not broken. We wished to see the nature of mankind; how better than to give them new worlds to explore?”

“Be careful what you wish for,” I said.

The Curator pushed himself up from his chair.

“So, gentlemen, I have laid my case before you. What is your decision? Will you take it?”

I caught Holmes’ eye. This whole thing was madness, but from one look I knew what he was thinking. I could not let him go alone, and he knew it. With a nod, I gave my affirmation.

Holmes sprang to his feet.

“Indeed we do! The game! My dear Curator. The game is afoot!”

“It’ll probably be secondary -world,” said Adrian when I spoke to him about this, “as that’s my thing.” And oddly, ‘The Final Conjuration’ takes both the longest and shortest leap with the concept of the anthology, actually ’porting Doyle’s original creation directly out of Victorian England and dropping him into the ultra-High-Fantasy world of the seven great Lords Wizard. I suppose it’s cheating, but the detective’s palpable frustration at being unable to ‘eliminate the impossible,’ according to his famous maxim, is worth it.

Y
OU WILL HAVE
heard, of course, of those events in the Year of the Yellow Cat that almost plunged us all into a disastrous war. A handful of days, now consigned to history, when the great wizard-lords mustered their most destructive energies, and armies of conjured demons roamed restless on every border, waiting to be unleashed.

And yet the details of these events are as obscure as they are notable. How the business was resolved has been hidden behind a veil for many decades, by those fearing that the revelation might open up wounds only recently scabbed over.

Now, however, these matters have passed into something close to myth, so that my master, the Green Wizard Ang Tze, has graciously given permission to this humble scholar to narrate the full truth, many particulars of which are known to none but I.

You will recall that year was marked by many an inauspicious omen, so that throughout the drawn-out months of the dry season the wise prepared for ill fortune, and the foolish sought to perpetrate it.

This is how it started: I had been seated on an ornamental hill overlooking the demesne of my master, and pondering certain philosophical absolutes, when my master’s summons shattered my train of thought. I was transported in the blink of an eye into his audience chamber, a nine-sided doorless vessel of glass which was lit emerald by his radiance.

“Wu Tsan,” he said, “a most unwished-for occurrence has transpired. I am called to the demesne of Men Shen, the Blue Wizard.”

I was speechless. Rarely indeed would any of the great lords venture into the sanctum of another.

“The call has gone out to all of us,” he clarified. “Some fate has befallen Men Shen.”

My heart was all but stilled. The Blue Wizard, no less than my master, was one of the great lords. To even so much as inconvenience him would require a degree of power only possessed by his peers. The seven wizard lords had ruled in peace—if a quarrelsome and acrimonious peace—for many long centuries, but the spectre of war between them had always been present. Such a war would reshape the world, transform or obliterate millions, perhaps destroy all.

“Wu Tsan,” my master said, naming me once more. “Of my servants, you are noted for your open and enquiring mind. Today such qualities may find favour. Travel with me, and we shall see what has become of Men Shen.”

T
HEY WERE ALL
present: the Green Wizard was the last to arrive. It is a testament to the splendour of the lords of our world that they held my attention, and not the shocking devastation of our surroundings.

Soo Mi the Red was attired in feathers wreathed in flames, beautiful and terrible. Amyat Pre the Golden bore about her broad body many hundredweights of precious metal in chains and amulets and mail. The Black Wizard Lu, squat and toadlike, wore festering rags and stank of swamp water, a stark contrast to the Ochre Wizard, whose name had been cut from her in an assassination attempt a thousand years before. She was slender as a pole, taller than anyone there by a head. Last, there was Sun Gong the White, androgynous, flesh gleaming softly, whose eyes were covered with smoked glass so that the fires of her/his gaze could not burn us.

Nobody spoke in the long moments after my master’s arrival. The great lords of the world were uncomfortable in the presence of those who could challenge them.

Around us was the demesne of the Blue Wizard. Some great force had torn it apart, so that blocks and scraps of its dense blue-black stone were scattered for miles around us. I could just make out the foundations of villages, like the stubs of rotten teeth. The toll amongst the peasantry must have been terrible. All too often, as the philosophers write, a slight against one great lord is written in the blood of thousands.

Lu the Black was already indicating the true reason for the summons. The deaths of peasants was a tragedy, but it would not have moved my master and his peers to gather here.

There was Men Shen the Blue Wizard, but blue no longer. His complexion and attire alike were granite grey, and he stood in an attitude of alarm, hands raised to perform his magic. Alas, that magic had not saved him. Here was not the man himself, but only an effigy. He had been turned to stone.

“So,” said the Red Wizard, her flames dancing higher. “At last someone has had their fill of peace. We knew it would come to this.”

“We knew no such thing,” said nameless Ochre. “And we do not know what has happened now.”

“What’s
happened?
” demanded Lu. “One of you has broken the peace! One of you has initiated a cowardly blow against Men Shen, striking him down in his very hall. One of you, in short, believes himself strong enough to rule the world alone.”

He looked on my master as he said this, and Ang Tze replied hotly, “One of us? Or
you?
For you were never a friend to Men Shen.”

“We have none of us ever been friends,” the White Wizard pronounced. “I regret that our truce has not held. I will return to my own demesne and prepare to defend the security of my holdings.” And he/she was gone in a scattering of light.

“Wait,” said Amyat Pre the Golden hurriedly. “This need not descend to war. We have all built much in these peaceful centuries. All will be lost and scattered if we fight.”

“Then let the malefactor confess,” the Red Wizard declared. “Let the guilty party be brought forth, and stripped of power. Or war there will be.”

W
E TRAVELLED BACK
to my master’s demesne. Ang Tze kept me by his side and I had never seen him more troubled.

“Wu Tsan, you have aided me in the past, in seeking hard-to-find truths,” he said to me.

I confirmed that it had been my pleasure.

“You have a singular source of information. You know the demon to which I refer.” Ang Tze pinched at the bridge of his nose, a sign of unhappiness. “If ever there was need of true knowledge, it is now. Go, conjure your familiar. Find out who struck down Men Shen, or the world may end in many-coloured fire.”

I
T IS NO
great matter for magicians to call up demons. Most summon soldiers or workers, winged steeds, or to gain knowledge of other realms beyond our own.

I believe I am the only magician who has called up a demon of thought: not one that can impart secrets of the unknown, but one that can examine the known, and order and interpret the details of everyday life. Of course, I am a scholar first and foremost, and not a practical magician. I have never sought to reshape the world, only to understand it.

I had called up this particular demon several times in the past, when my own perspicacity had proved unequal to whatever problem was facing me. Now, I judged, I required all its formidable powers of investigation.

I burned the requisite herbs, burdening the air of my chambers with the potent haze of ginseng, radiant lotus and coca leaf, and I drew out the sigils and the numerals that were its secret name. In a trance, I reached out into the gloomy and cramped netherworld that was the demon’s own demesne, that half- glimpsed place of enclosing walls, spaces crowded with too many bodies, air that was rank and malodorous with the smoke of chimneys.

And I named it. I called it through the boundaries between the worlds, opening the way. Sometimes I would have to try many times before it deigned to answer.

Not this time, though. This time I simply uttered, “Sherlock,” and it was there.

I
REMEMBER WHEN
I first summoned the Sherlock.

It was a trivial matter, but then I have always been a trivial man. There was unrest within oneof my lord’s villages and I was sent to quell it. Being no creature of force or violence, I instead sought to understand the cause, discovering it to be a matter of thefts from many of the people there: the disappearance of small items of sentimental value.

I summoned the Sherlock as an academic exercise. I had often wondered if it might be possible to conjure a demon of investigation. In many ways the goings-on of our own world at a mundane level are great mysteries. We are very well informed about the conditions of a hundred other worlds. We understand the underlying nature of the fabric of reality and how to reweave, stitch and cut it to our liking. The truth of how a farmer lost his shoe, or what lies behind a closed door: these are not fit subjects for magic. Magic is a distorting mirror. The one thing you cannot see in it is the truth.

So, after much experimentation, I successfully conjured the Sherlock for the first time. It appeared as a very pale, very tall man, its features as sharp and hooked as aneagle’s, wearing severe and drab clothes of an alien cloth and fashion. The scent of coca redoubled as it manifested, so that I thought that must be the native atmosphere of its home. The demon looked on me and my surroundings—so different from its gloomy netherworld home—with the wide eyes of a man gripped by a fever.

Some demons rail against captivity and service. Others wheedle and beg and bargain. The Sherlock was not like this. For a while I could not engage with it at all. It did not seem to credit me with any objective existence. It is a humbling prospect, to have the demon you have summoned refuse to consent to your being. At last I fell to describing the puzzle that I was working on, and that caught the Sherlock’s interest. An abrupt and striking change came over it, lending an animation to its gaunt features. It asked me many questions, and I confess I could not answer most of them. Instead, the demon and I visited many places where the thefts had occurred, and it made enquiry of the terrified peasantry.