A Study in Starlight—Chapter One

Being a Renewal of the Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D.

Introductory Note

Recognising that many twenty-third-century readers will be unfamiliar with the background of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson—as given in the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle—a very brief outline of their shared history may prove helpful.

Watson was born in 1852 and Holmes in 1854. Watson became an army surgeon and served in the Second Afghan War, where he was wounded. He met Holmes, already establishing himself as a ‘consulting detective’, for the first time in 1881 and they took up shared rooms at 221B Baker Street, London. For the next ten years Watson was Holmes’s companion in many adventures and chronicled a selection of them.

In 1888, a young woman called Mary Morstan came to consult Holmes. In the course of the ensuing adventure, Watson and Mary fell in love and became engaged, and were married soon after.

Around this time Holmes became increasingly concerned with the threat posed by the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty. In 1891, attempting to elude Moriarty, Holmes and Watson travelled to Switzerland, but the Professor soon tracked them down. Luring Watson away, Moriarty confronted Holmes at the edge of the chasm of the Reichenbach Falls. At the scene, Watson found signs of struggle but no survivors, and returned home believing both men to have perished.

During the following three years, often known as ‘The Great Hiatus’, Watson suffered further tragedy with Mary’s death. In 1894, however, Sherlock Holmes ‘returned from the dead’. He explained that Moriarty had plunged into the falls while he himself had escaped, but he had allowed it to be thought that he too had been lost, allowing him to remain undercover while pursuing the remaining members of Moriarty’s gang. Holmes chose not to reveal himself to Watson as he felt that Watson might struggle to maintain the necessary appearance of grief and loss. Watson laboured for some time to come to terms with this deception.

Holmes resumed his detective practice and Watson continued to record certain of their exploits, going on into the twentieth century. Indeed, several stories are dated after the year 1902, a fact which is crucial to the following narrative.

Dr John H Watson, Trevallan Orbiter, 2238

Part One

Being a Continuation of the Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D.

Chapter One

“Holmes, am I going mad?”

Holmes smiled as if he had anticipated my exact words. “What troubles you, Watson?”

“Dash it, Holmes, can you not see? Ten minutes ago I looked out of the window, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. All we’ve done since then is walk down the stairs, and step out of the front door, but….”

I spun around, looking upward, but saw no window from which I could have gazed down. There was a door, through which we had passed just a moment before, but it was not the panelled and painted door of 221B Baker Street. It was merely a rectangle of the same smooth, parchment-coloured, material as the wall, lacking even a knob or a knocker, bearing only the legend 9:14.

Nor was there any of the usual business of the street, yet not five minutes before I had looked down and it had appeared normal: hansom-cabs rattling to and fro; a messenger-boy scurrying along the far pavement, dodging nimbly around slower pedestrians; a lady lifting her skirts to step over the gutter as she began to cross.

I looked higher. There are days when London smog makes the streets feel close-confined; there was no smog here, but there was no sky either. The walls curved over into a roof or ceiling maybe twenty feet above, all seamlessly uniform but for a diffuse brightening down the centre, illuminating the scene.

Stepping out into Baker Street, I would have expected my nostrils to be assailed by the acrid tang of horse-dung, and the smoke of a hundred chimneys. Here, there was only a faint and unfamiliar aroma, vaguely resinous.

Only then did I realise that the coat I had donned mere moments before had vanished as if it had simply evaporated. The same, my fearful hand informed me, was true of my hat.

“Holmes…” The tremor in my voice matched the trembling in my knees. “This is not Baker Street, is it?”

“Most decidedly not,” said he, apparently amused.

“Then where in God’s name are we?”

“Let us hasten to catch our conveyance, and then I shall endeavour to elucidate.” He took my arm and urged me gently into motion. The street—if it was a street—appeared to slope up ahead of us, but each step felt level to my legs. “For now, let me just say, the question you should be asking is not merely where but also when.”

#

If I thought of the vehicle we had boarded as a kind of Underground train, that was one less thing to puzzle over. True, it was uncannily silent, and its acceleration pressed me back in my seat unlike any train I had previously experienced, but it was at least travelling in some sort of tunnel. I held to that, as one thing not completely beyond my understanding.

“Holmes,” I said, uncomfortably aware of the pleading note in my voice, “How is it that you can accept all this so calmly? Even for you, this must be…”

“Oh, there is a great deal I still do not comprehend. I have, however, had a little longer than you to at least try to make some sense of it.”

Inspector Francis leaned forward, the better to join our tete to-tete. I noticed with an almost galvanic shock that his fingernails were painted amethyst, vivid against pale gold skin. How had I not noticed before how… unconventional his attire was? Loose, almost pyjama-like garments with a silken sheen, colours that shifted with the light like the wing of a magpie. “Mr Holmes had many questions. I wanted to answer them at once, but really we should have waited for you.”

“Yes,” said Holmes. “Whatever I may be now, my analytical processes feel the same. And, though I may chaff you sometimes, Watson, I am well aware that I rarely do my best work without you at my side, or at least close at hand.”

That was a tribute such as he had rarely paid me, and for a moment I felt threatened by tears, but saved myself from any unmanly exhibition by seizing on the first part of his utterance. “Holmes, what the devil do you mean by whatever I may be now?”

“Admirable, Watson! You cut to the heart of the matter.” He glanced at Inspector Francis. “Would you care to begin…?”

A few minutes later, the capsule was gliding smoothly to a stop, and we stood up ready to disembark. I was still no nearer understanding. I wondered if even Holmes’s extraordinary mind had truly grasped the tale the Inspector had just related.

“I’m supposed to believe that I have been… recreated?” I demanded as we stepped out.

“ReIncarnated might be a better word,” said Holmes.

Francis nodded. “Or simply Incarnated. We do call it that, though compiled is more usual. And some still say printed, though it’s very different… Of course, even 3D printing was unknown in Victorian times.” He checked himself. “Maybe better not get too fixated on the physical process, not yet. The point is your consciousness has been… recreated, restored, renewed, take your pick, and given a new home.”

“But this is my body…”

He smiled. “That means the compilers—that we did a good job. But it feels like your body because it is modelled on your self-image.” He gestured towards an exit.

“A self-image ultimately drawn from every word ever committed to print in the name of Doctor John H Watson,” said Holmes, glancing at Francis. “If I have understood you correctly.”

“Exactly. And augmented with a mass of detail from historical sources, and from critical studies over more than two centuries. It’s true for both of you.”

It would be difficult to bow while walking, so Holmes merely touched his cap.

“Here we are,” said the Inspector.

#

I suppose there comes a point when one’s capacity for wonder, bewilderment—whatever it was that I had been feeling in the last hour—becomes exhausted. I surveyed the physicality of the Control Room with barely a flicker of emotion. I had seen moving pictures before, notably at the Théâtre Optique in Paris, and the screens which occupied most of the wall were not impossibly far removed from these, at least in my, doubtless inadequate, judgement. There was also a kind of circular desk in the centre, above which images appeared to hover in mid-air. For all I could tell, this was some kind of optical illusion; indeed, what else could it be? When one goes about with Sherlock Holmes, one soon learns that not everything is quite as it may appear to the eye.

Then, however, a figure emerged from an alcove or side-entrance, and my capacity for wonder found a new lease of life.

She was phenomenally tall, several inches taller than Holmes, himself in excess of six feet. She was also remarkably dark, a Nubian perhaps, and entirely bald. Yet, despite the height and the smooth scalp, I never for a moment questioned her sex, though I could hardly have told why. Her cobalt-blue one-piece garment, reminiscent of a workman’s overall, revealed little of her form. Only her forearms showed, dark and slender below sleeves rolled to the elbow.

“Robin.” She gave Inspector Francis a familiar smile. Her voice was low for a woman, slightly husky, and with an accent I was quite unable to place. “Guess these’re the gentlemen you been gabbin’ about.”

“May I introduce Mr Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson?”

“Delighted, madam,” said Holmes. I had never before seen him faced with a woman clearly taller than himself—possibly six inches taller, I thought now—but if he was disconcerted he concealed it well.

I stammered something, and felt myself redden. I could only hope it would not be obvious; the overall lighting was quite low, and the screens scattered many-coloured glows over us.

“Squisite t’meet you. I’m Mary Syrtis Mall’stang.” The hitch in the last name, here indicated by the apostrophe, was tiny but unmistakable.

“How extraordinary,” a voice said; after a moment I realised the voice was my own. I essayed a bow. “I beg your pardon, madam. I was taken aback.”

The ebon-skinned woman seemed quite unoffended. “Guess you’ve never seen a Martian afore?” I suppose I gaped. Her smile broadened, a mischievous challenge. “You pref mi gab vrai Redder ling?”

My face doubtless betrayed the bafflement I felt, but Holmes’s countenance assumed a look I knew well. “Might I essay to parse that? Mi: presumably me or I. Pref: contraction of prefer. Gab: as in the gift of the gab; to speak or talk. Vrai: it sounds like French, and I shall hazard that it is indeed a loan-word. Redder… here I speculate, but you did say Martian, and is Mars not called the Red Planet? Ling: not, I think, a reference to a variety of heather, but an abbreviation, perhaps, of lingo, for language. Putting all together, I believe, madam, you were offering to address us in authentic Martian dialect?”

“Sureas,” said she. “Stutely grokked.”

“If I may,” I interposed. “When I said ‘extraordinary’, I was in fact referring to something more particular. My wife’s name was Mary… and her maiden name was Morstan.”

“I get that’s kinda sim’lar… but I don’t grok ‘maiden name’.”

From somewhere beside me I heard a sound I knew well: Holmes clearing his throat, a sign of impatience. He’d had his flourish; now he was eager to return to the matter in hand.

“Pardon me,” said I. “I gather serious business requires our attention.” Rationally, I should have stopped there, but something possessed me to go on: “I should be delighted to satisfy your curiosity at another time.”

I feared she would laugh, or merely brush off what immediately seemed the clumsiest kind of advance, but she only flashed another smile. “Why not?”

“If I may, Miss Mall’stang,” said Holmes.

“’Miss’?” she repeated with a quizzical inflection.

“The correct title is Commander Mall’stang,” said Francis. “Or, off duty, everyone’s ‘Zen.”

“Your pardon, Commander. You understand, everything here is new to my colleague and myself. Would you be so good as to relate the circumstances prior to the discovery of the body?”

She nodded. Gleams of red and purple and green slid across the satin curves of her scalp. “All seemed like a routine flight. He—”

“—Pardon me. By ‘he’ I take it you refer to Hental Shemza, the unfortunate victim?”

“Sureas.”

“And Mis—Pardon me, I should say ‘Zen?— Shemza was alone on the vessel?”

She nodded again. I could scarce take my eyes off her. “Yes, sole op. He’d been droppin’ transponders up near the North Pole.”

An extraordinary thing happened. I was quite certain I had never heard the word ‘transponder’ before, could not have made even a guess at its meaning, but as soon as I wondered, I found an explanation unfolding in my mind, like a voice inside my skull.

The Nubian—or Martian—woman continued, “Boostin’ up from the Pole ain’t the same as a low-latitude launch. It’s further, and you don’t get the kick from planetary rotation. ‘Stead of takin’ a couple of hours it’s at least four. Standard protocol, we were monitorin’ his telemetry, checkin’ in on vox every half-hour. And, ‘course, on final approach we were talkin’ to him every few minims.”

Just as I had done with ‘transponder’, I found that as soon as I framed a question in my mind—what is telemetry, say—an answer presented itself. It wasn’t a panacea; more often than not, the answers employed terminology which required further elucidation. Still, certain things were slowly becoming clearer; and some of them were so startling as to make me tremble violently. To my relief, none of the others seemed to notice. I tried simultaneously to follow what Mary Mall’stang was saying, and to reach some accommodation with this new realisation.

The ‘boost’ she spoke of was a flight into space; and at this moment we were on a space station, a kind of city, or rather a small town, floating thousands of miles above the earth. Except that the world below us was not Earth, but a planet called Trevallan, fifth planet of a solar system dozens of light years from the Sun. I swayed, steadied myself on the nearest surface, retaining just enough presence of mind to check that I touched nothing except the grey casing.

Mary Mall’stang concluded her tale. Shemza had boarded his ship after placing the last transponder, received permission to launch, and begun his journey. All had been in order, or appeared so, up to and including final docking. Shemza had maintained regular comms throughout the voyage; all of these brief dialogues had been recorded and were available should we wish to hear them. The ship had settled into what I visualised as some kind of cradle and had been automatically connected to… at this point my comprehension faltered. Mary Mall’stang said it was connected to ‘the usual systems’. Quite what those ‘systems’ might be I could not guess. I could, again, have asked a question in my head, but I preferred to keep following her narration.

In which… Shemza had not emerged from the airlock, and there had been silence on the comms. Mall’stang and her colleagues had become first puzzled, then concerned, and she had dispatched someone to investigate. This person had found the airlock sealed; the vessel could not be opened from without save by an emergency override, which Mall’stang duly authorised.

#

“If I might summarise…” Holmes gave me the briefest of glances, a sardonic smile tweaking at his lips. “In such unfamiliar circumstances, it would seem particularly vital to be certain that I do properly grasp the key facts.”

In other words, I thought, You’re almost as bemused as I am, just less willing to admit it.

“I do see, Inspector, why you described this as the ultimate locked-room mystery.” Francis beamed. He was very young, I thought. And now I considered further, ‘he’ came liberally garnished with question marks.

In two decades as companion, confidant, and collaborator, I had enjoyed innumerable opportunities to observe Holmes’s methods. Of course, I could never match his analytical abilities; few indeed were those who could, and among them Moriarty had died at Reichenbach, while Holmes’s own brother shunned the limelight. Nonetheless, I flattered myself that I had at least honed my powers of observation—powers already developed to a degree by my medical training—and now I applied these to Robin Francis.

What I perceived was a young person of medium height and slender build. The shoulders appeared broad but there could have padding beneath the fabric of his garment, which could equally have been called jacket or shirt. Below… again I could not find the right term. They ended a little below the knee, but they were not breeches, knickerbockers, or plus-fours, for they were not gathered into cuffs, or tucked into stockings or boots.

Long dark hair was swept back, and retained with a narrow band of some flexible material. All in all I was garnering an impression of effeminacy such as I had not observed even in Mr Oscar Wilde at his most flamboyant.

During my association with Holmes, I have met many outlandish characters, and have learned that sometimes the blackest heart lurks beneath the most respectable exterior—and, of course, vice versa. ‘Never judge a book by its cover’, as they say. Nonetheless, Francis was far removed from any notion I had of a police officer. Perhaps, I thought, it was a disguise of some kind—had not Holmes fooled me on numerous occasions, including several when he had passed as a woman?

Passed as a woman… My mind was on a fresh track now, and several clues jostled for my attention. The light tenor voice, which might equally be a low-ish contralto; the unlined skin; the jaw, as smooth as if no razor had ever been required. Was it possible Inspector Francis was actually a woman? Had I merely assumed that an ‘Inspector’ must be male?

I had never encountered, nor heard of, women in any police force, barring the Matrons who oversaw female suspects and prisoners. But we were not in our own time, or our own world; who knew what might be possible? After all, the Martian, Mary Mall’stang, was a Commander, a person of high authority here.

I had considered all this in far less time than it takes to relate, and had missed none of Holmes’s questions. Now, he asked, “The… hatch… you mention is the only possible means of ingress and egress, I believe.”

“There’s another for ‘mergencies,” said Mary Mall’stang. “But it’s secured by explosive bolts. If they’d been discharged, that’d be vrai obvious.” As they discussed further, it struck me that much of the terminology they employed was familiar from my time on board ship—ocean-going ships—on the voyages to and from Karachi. The word ‘ship’ itself, hatch, bulkhead, helm, and many more.

Holmes nodded. “And, to be clear, all this is necessary because the vessel spends much of its time in the vacuum of space, and even when it is operating within the atmosphere it is mostly travelling at speeds which I—and doubtless Watson also—find frankly staggering.”

“Staggering indeed,” said I, “The fastest conveyance in our time is the steam locomotive, and to the best of my knowledge none has ever attained one hundred miles per hour.”

It seemed that the European, or metric, system was used exclusively here. From our Continental travels, both Holmes and I had some acquaintance with it, but I did not have the intuitive grasp of speed or scale that I enjoyed with feet and miles. I had, however, understood that, merely to escape the planet and reach orbit, the vessel needed to reach a speed, not of hundreds, but many thousands of miles per hour.

“There is a—widely disputed—claim to that effect from the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad,” said Holmes, “Many cases, my own and those of others, have hinged on the maximum speed of a railway train.” He smiled at the eager Francis. “And I should be happy to elaborate on such matters at your leisure, but I hardly think it advances the present enquiry.”

He brought his hands together in a prayerful gesture, fingertips just below his aquiline nose. “I think, taking your assurances on the matter as definitive, we can rule out any other person entering or leaving the vessel between its leaving the surface and arrival here.”

“Eliminate the impossible,” said Francis. My mind needed no extraneous help to complete the dictum: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

However improbable indeed, I thought, and I was not thinking solely of the case of the late Hental Shemza.

“Indeed. Creating, as you said, a seemingly perfect locked-room mystery. However, since the man is dead, and since his injuries could not have been self-inflicted, someone or something must have been present during the approximately four hours of the voyage.”

“In fact,” said I, “The recorded body temperature suggests that death occurred somewhere close to the midpoint of the voyage.”

“Which would require that the killer was on board at that time,” said Holmes. “Perhaps, Watson, you would be so kind as to run your practised eye over all the forensic evidence.”

“If you wish… though I am sure medical science in this time has advanced far beyond anything I know.”

“Nevertheless, you have at least seen the results of violent death many times; I gather the resident doctor has limited experience, and that only with accidental death.”

“If you think it may help, Holmes, I shall gladly do all I can.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Now, however, our immediate business should be to inspect the scene of the crime.”

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