FROM THE DREAM JOURNAL OF DR. JOHN WATSON
THE LOUDEST THING THERE IS, ACCORDING TO PEOPLE who claim to have heard it, is the voice of God. It will carry across continents, with a force that cannot be disobeyed; when God speaks, all must hear.
Not so the devil. In fact, the devil does not speak at all.
The devil sings.
And not intrusively. If you’ve ever heard the devil’s song, it is because you wished to. The devil sings soft. Slow.
Adagio.
The wisest thing is not to listen. Yet those who choose to chance their soul should heed, at least, this warning: listen well.
Tonight I’m going to hear the devil. For the first time, my dream is infused with a special urgency. This is happening right now. It is nearly four in the morning in London, where my body lies in tussled sheets in 221B, its heart beating feebly. That makes it almost nine at night in Deadwood—too early an hour for real mischief, but a perfect time to start it. And just the spot—the Gem Saloon.
The air is full of smoke and sweat. It’s a rainy night and people come in shaking water from their collars and hats. It’s as crowded as it gets. Anyone who wants a drink is gonna have to wait a spell. But that doesn’t matter. Nobody would miss the show tonight. There’s a special treat—a singer come all the way from Olde London Towne. And the word is: she’s a real corker!
In the back corner sits a man, alone at a table. He’s well dressed, in as much as any American ever is, in a dark gray suit with less fluting than his countrymen generally glue on to their jackets. His waistcoat is black and the carnation in his buttonhole is purest white. He has one of those grand, sweeping moustaches they wear out West, but instead of a Stetson he wears a gray bowler, to make him look more continental.
It isn’t working; he looks like a gunfighter.
Which is apt, because he is one. This is a man accustomed to taking life and to risking his own. He was a bad man once, though now reformed. He has only one small revolver on his person, and in his pocket is a wallet with a badge: an all-seeing eye, above the words “We Never Sleep”. He’s a Pinkerton detective. And he’s here tonight to work.
He’s just not sure what kind of work it will be.
He checks his pocket watch. Nine exactly. Near the stage there is a muted clamor in the audience, a whispered debate as to whether the show has started. Then the room falls quiet.
But not silent.
There is one sound. A single note. Hovering pure and sweet, just at the edge of hearing. It is only one human voice, yet with an almost inhuman quality. So small a thing to command so large a room. You have to strain to hear it.
If you’ve ever heard the devil’s song, it is because you wished to.
The tattered red curtain rattles open, and there she is: my murderess. The Woman. Irene Adler. The light plays on her simple white dress and her outstretched arms. Her eyes are closed as she pours herself forward into that one quiet note. Her accompanist shakes himself from his trance, leans over his battered piano and plays a few chords of introduction. Poor fool, he’s well out of his depth. And he’s not the only one. As Irene launches into her song—an Italian ode to the silent swan who sings only once, as she knows herself to be dying—the Pinkerton man sits frozen at the back, a glass of whiskey halfway to his lips.
This is his foe?
She’s just like in the briefings, in a way. The old man himself, Allan Pinkerton, took him aside before he left, to urge him to remember the importance of his mission and the excellence of his opponent. They taught him all about her. And yet they did not prepare him.
He’s been told that she is foremost a mastermind—both at a strategic and tactical level—always two moves ahead. Her second level of significance is as a sorcerer. They think. The level of art she possesses is unclear, but as she grew up as a ward of James Moriarty, she is to be treated as if she were amongst the world’s most dangerous practitioners of the magical arts. Third: she is a beauty. And she knows it. She dominates with it. Fourth: she is a singer. As the agent sits with his mouth just slightly open, listening to Irene Adler leap from one note to land daintily, perfectly at the next…
By God, if this is the fourth best thing she does…
Her green eyes are open now. She is smiling out at the audience as if to say, I’m so glad you all came here tonight, to give your hearts and wills to me.
Can she be beaten? The agent swallows his whiskey. He’s going to try. He’s going to put his life on the line again, tonight. It’s going to be a close-run thing, but she has something the old man wants. Two things, if intelligence is to be believed: the Heart and the Cruciator. In short, should things go badly for him this evening, they could go very badly indeed.
She sees him sitting at the back of the room and gives him a shy smile. What a lie! Irene Adler? Shy? I know her well enough to realize it’s not even a real smile; it is an opening move—an invitation to her foe to come and play against her. I wonder how the game will go.
But the dream is shifting me away. Why? Damn it, why?
This is all I want to see: her. And I suppose I even want to see him. Or, no. To be him. He’s about to cross swords with the foe I most cherish, to enter into that dance of tricks and lies and—damn it—probably seduction that forms the most addictive game I know. Why can’t I play?
Why is she so far from me?
* * *
Now I’m looking at a youth, not even twenty. He has a shock of forgettable brown hair over a splash of freckles. His clothes are more suited to the age of Elizabeth than Victoria. He’s holding a candle in one hand and a broken feather in the other. With careful purpose, he holds the feather above the candle. As the air fills with the stink of singed barbules, he says, “Demon, I have done your bidding.”
He’s not talking to anybody, just a shadow on the wall.
Though… it is a bit of a deep, palpable, twisting shadow, if I’m honest. From the empty corners of the room comes a voice—soft and distant and audibly displeased.
“Not to my satisfaction.”
“I care nothing for your satisfaction,” scoffs the youth. “I have fulfilled the word of our contract, if not your intent. Now I claim my fee: I will live the life of another being. And then, when that is over, I shall return to the life that is mine, having lost no moment of it.”
“But you have not helped me,” the voice insists. “I cannot long endure upon this world.”
“And from what I gather,” says the young man, with a smirk, “that time will be even shorter if you try to withhold payment. I have done my part and I now demand my due!”
The demon is quiet a moment. “Very well. I shall render first the payment I would have given, had you pleased me…”
And the world shifts and skews. The young man and I are swept away, into the body of another living thing. We have no power to control its actions, but we feel as if we are the creature; we think its thoughts.
The world is a deep, brown haze. A stretchy membrane contains me and I begin pushing against it. It gives way. I am climbing free—free from my shell and the mud that cradled it—out into the light. As I stand, dazed and stupid, letting my newborn eyes accustom themselves to the new input of sight, instinct takes over and I spread my wings in the sun. They are wrinkled and weak, but as they dry they stiffen. My six legs can move me back and forth along the surface of the mud. I hardly even notice when my wings begin to vibrate, then to beat. I’m flying! Up into the air—a clumsy circle, then back down. Around me, more and more of my fellows are emerging.
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 four 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.
