The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781476797502
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

From his rooms in Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes grapples with forces of deceit, intrigue, and evil in Victorian London. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes inspired The Map of Chaos by New York Times bestselling author Félix J. Palma. As a gift to readers, this ebook edition includes an excerpt from The Map of Chaos.

Keep reading for a preview of

The Map of Chaos

by

Félix J Palma

Prologue

The debate was due to commence in fifteen minutes when they glimpsed the knowledge silhouetted against the golden canvas of twilight. The tiled domes of the vast edifice, soaring above the pointed rooftops of the London skyline, fragmented the sun’s last rays into myriad shimmering reflections. Bloated zeppelins, aerostats, ornithopters, and winged cabriolets circled around like a swarm of insects, bobbing amidst the clouds. In one of those very carriages, gliding majestically toward the building, sat the eminent biologist Herbert George Wells, accompanied by his lovely wife. Or should I say, his intelligent, dazzlingly beautiful wife.

At that moment, the biologist looked down from his window. An agitated crowd thronged the narrow streets that snaked between the lofty towers studded with stained glass windows, and connected by suspension bridges. Gentlemen in top hats and capes prattled to one another through their communication gloves, ladies walked their mechanical dogs, children whizzed by on electric roller skates, and long-legged automatons made their way through the torrent of people, stepping over them with calculated agility, as they went diligently about their errands. From the waters of the Thames, gilded by the sunset, tiny Nautiluses manufactured by Verne Industries would occasionally rise to the surface, like globefish, to disgorge their passengers on both banks of the river. However, as they drew closer to where the palace stood in South Kensington, the teeming anthill appeared to be moving in one direction. Everyone knew that the most important debate to be held in the Palace of Knowledge in the last ten years was taking place that evening. Just then, as if to remind the ornithopter’s passengers, a mechanical bird flew by announcing the event with pompous enthusiasm before gliding toward the nearest building, where it continued its refrain perched on a gargoyle head.

Inside the flying machine, Wells took a deep breath in an attempt to calm himself and wiped his clammy hands on his trouser legs.

“Do you think his hands are sweating as well?” he asked Jane.

“Of course, Bertie. He has as much invested in this as you. Besides, we mustn’t forget that his problem makes it—”

“What problem? Oh come now, Jane!” Wells interrupted. “He’s been seeing the best speech therapist in the kingdom for years. It’s high time we stopped thinking he has a problem.”

As though considering the matter closed, Wells settled back in his seat and gazed absentmindedly at the rows of sunflower houses colonizing Hyde Park, turning on their pillars in search of the sun’s last rays. He wasn’t going to admit to Jane that his rival suffered from that insidious problem (which, if necessary, he fully intended to make use of), for if the man trounced him, his defeat would be doubly shameful. But Wells wasn’t going to fail. Whether or not the old man had his little problem under control, Wells outstripped him as a speaker. If he gave an inspired performance that evening, he would beat the old man hands down, and even if he didn’t he would still triumph. Wells was slightly concerned that his opponent might win the public over with some of the syllogisms he used to spice up his rhetoric. However, Wells trusted the audience would not be blinded by a vulgar fireworks display.

Wells smiled to himself. He truly believed that his was the most significant generation to have walked the earth, for, unlike those that had gone before, his held the future of the human race in its hands. Right or wrong, the decisions it made would reverberate through the centuries to come. Wells couldn’t hide his enthusiasm at belonging to this exhilarating period of human history, when the world’s salvation was to be decided. If all went well, that evening his name might be recorded for all time in the annals of History.

“It isn’t vanity that makes me want to win, Jane,” he suddenly said to his wife. “It is simply that I believe my theory is correct, and we can’t waste time proving his.”

“I know, dear. You are many things to me, but I have never thought of you as vain,” she fibbed. “If only there were sufficient funding to back both projects. Having to choose between them is risky. If we’re mistaken—”

Jane broke off in mid-sentence, and Wells said nothing more. His was the winning theory, he was certain of that. Although there were times, especially certain nights as he observed the lights of the city through his study window, when he wondered whether finally they weren’t all mistaken; whether his world, where the quest for knowledge controlled everything, really was the best of all possible worlds. During those moments of weakness, as he referred to them in the cold light of day, he toyed with the idea that Ignorance was preferable to Knowledge. It might have been better to allow Nature and her laws to remain shrouded in darkness, to carry on believing that comets heralded the death of kings, and dragons still dwelled in unmapped territories . . . But the Church of Knowledge, the sole religion on the planet, whose Holy See was in London, brought together philosophy, theology, politics, and the sciences in a single discipline. It ruled men’s lives from the moment they were born, encouraging them to decipher the Creator’s work, to discover its components. It even compelled them to solve the riddle of their own existence. Under the church’s auspices, man had transformed the quest for Knowledge into his reason for being, and, in his eagerness to unravel each of the mysteries that made the universe beautiful, he had ended up peeping behind the curtain. Perhaps they were now simply paying the price for their recklessness.

A red carpet had been rolled out in front of the palace doors, and on either side a noisy crowd was brandishing every sort of placard, while a dozen bobbies tried to contain their fervor. Since its construction, the cathedralesque building had been the stage of great symposia regarding the dimensions of the universe, the origins of time, or the existence of the super-atom, all legendary debates whose most memorable phrases and parries had passed into common usage. The ornithopter circled the palace towers, hovering for a moment before alighting on a clear area of street cordoned off for that purpose. The cleaner-spiders had made the windows gleam, and the mechanical pelicans had devoured the garbage in the gutters, leaving that part of the city spotless and crying out to be sullied anew. When the ornithopter had finally landed, a liveried automaton went to hold open the door for its occupants. Before stepping out, Wells glanced at Jane with a look of combined resolve and fear; she responded with a reassuring smile. The crowd burst into a unanimous roar of jubilation as he emerged from the vehicle. Wells could hear shouts of encouragement mixed with the booing of his rival’s supporters. With Jane on his arm, he crossed the gauntlet that was the red carpet, following the automaton and waving to the public as he tried hard to project the serenity of one who considers himself far superior to his opponent.

They walked through the portal, which bore an inscription in huge bronze lettering: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Once inside, the automaton led them along a narrow corridor to a dressing room and then offered to take Jane to the VIP box. It was time for them to part. Jane went over to Wells and straightened his tie.

“Don’t worry, Bertie. You’re going to be fine.”

“Thank you, my dear,” he mumbled.

They closed their eyes and gently joined foreheads for a few seconds, each honoring the other’s mind. After that intimate gesture, with which couples conveyed how necessary and enlightening the other’s company was for them in their collective journey toward Knowledge, Jane looked straight at her husband.

“Best of luck, my dear,” she told him, before declaring: “Chaos is inevitable.”

“Chaos is inevitable,” Wells repeated diligently.

He wished he could leave his wife with the slogan used in his parents’ day: “We are what we know,” which so faithfully summed up the aspirations of their generation. However, since the discovery of the dreadful fate that awaited the universe, the church had imposed this new slogan to raise awareness that the end was nigh.

After saying good-bye, Jane followed the automaton to the VIP box. As Wells watched her walk away, he admired yet again the miraculous sequence of genes that had created this woman, slender and lovely as a Dresden figurine, a sequence he had been unable to resist secretly unraveling in his laboratory, despite feeling that there was something oddly obscene about reducing his wife to an abstract jumble of facts and formulas. Before she disappeared at the end of the corridor, Jane gave him a final smile of encouragement, and the biologist experienced a sudden desire to kiss his wife’s lips. He instantly chastised himself. A kiss? What was he thinking? That gesture had long been obsolete, ever since the Church of Knowledge deemed it unproductive and subversive. Gloomily, he resolved to examine his response at length once the debate was over. The church encouraged people from an early age to analyze everything, including their feelings, to map out their inner selves and learn to repress any emotion that wasn’t useful or easily controlled. It wasn’t that love, or passion or friendship, was forbidden. Love of books or a passion for research was heartily approved of, provided the mind was in charge. But love between two people could only take place under strict surveillance. It was possible to abandon oneself freely to love (indeed, the church encouraged young people to mate in order to perpetuate the species), but it was also necessary to spend time analyzing love, examining its hidden motives, drawing diagrams of it and comparing them with those of a partner, presenting regular reports on love’s origin, evolution, and inconsistencies to the local parish priest, who would help scrutinize those treacherous emotions until they could be understood, for understanding was what made it possible to control everything. And yet, none of those emotions survived such scrutiny. The more you understood them, the fainter they became, like a dream fading as you try to recall it.

Wells couldn’t help admiring the Church of Knowledge’s ingenious solution to this thorny issue. By insisting love be understood, it had created the perfect vaccine against love. Prohibiting love would have elevated it, made it more desirable, capable of fomenting uprisings, wars, and acts of revenge. In short, it would have brought about another dark age, which would only have stood in the way of progress. And what would have become of them then? Would they have gotten that far had they allowed their feelings to govern them? Would they have amassed all that Knowledge, which as things stood might prove their only route to salvation? Wells didn’t think so. He was convinced that the key to the survival of the species lay in the judicious act of bridling mankind’s emotional impulses, unshackling humans from their feelings just as thousands of years before they had been freed from their instincts. Yet there were times, when he watched Jane sleeping, that he couldn’t stop himself from having doubts. Contemplating the placid abandon of her lovely face, the extreme fragility of her body momentarily deprived of the admirable personality that infused it with life, he would wonder whether the path to salvation and the path to happiness were one and the same.

Brushing aside these thoughts he entered the dressing room, the tiny space where he must spend the last few minutes before walking out onstage. He stood in the middle of the room, choosing not to sit on any of the chairs. The door opposite led to the auditorium. Through it filtered the excited roars of the crowd and the voice of Abraham Frey, the celebrated moderator, who at that moment was welcoming the various dignitaries attending the event. Soon they would announce his name, and he would have to go out onto the stage. Wells ruefully contemplated the right-hand wall. He knew that on the other side of it, in the adjoining dressing room, his rival was doubtless listening to the cries of the audience resounding through the amphitheater, with the same feigned determination.

Then Wells heard his name and the door opened, inviting him to abandon his sanctuary. He took a deep breath and strode forth onto the back of the stage. Seeing him, the crowd burst into feverish applause. A couple of the recording orbs floating above the auditorium whirled over and began circling him. Wells raised his hands in greeting as he gave his most serene smile, imagining it being reproduced on the communication screens in millions of homes. He walked over to his lectern, which bore the stem of a voice enhancer, and spread his hands over its surface. One of the spotlights located above the stage bathed his puny figure in a golden glow. Five or six yards to his right, his opponent’s lectern stood empty. While acknowledging the applause, the biologist took the opportunity to examine the stalls, separated from him by the pit, where a mechanical orchestra had started to play an evocative melody. Music creates order out of chaos, he thought, recalling the words of a famous violinist who had received the church’s blessing. Amidst the audience, Wells noticed banners and signs sporting his image as well as some of his famous sayings. Up above the rows of seats, beneath an enormous pennant with an eight-pointed star emerging from two concentric circles, Queen Victoria sat on her wheeled throne, in which she traveled everywhere of late. Next to her, on a less sumptuous throne, sat Cardinal Violet Tucker, the highest authority in the Church of Knowledge, who would preside over the debate. Her entourage sat in a cluster on her left, a flock of bishops and deacons with stern, embittered faces, who, together with the cardinal, made up the Budgetary Commission. That gaunt old lady, dressed in a black robe with gold silk buttons, and a sash and beret likewise gold, the color of Knowledge, would ultimately decide his fate. Wells noticed the goblet cupped in her right hand, which if the rumors were correct contained her anti-cancer medicine. On either side of the theater stood the boxes reserved for the authorities and prominent attendees, most notably Jules Verne, the French entrepreneur; Clara Shelley, the heiress to Prometheus Industries, a leading manufacturer of automatons; and various members of the scientific community. Wells could see Jane in the VIP box. She was talking to Doctor Pleasance, the wife of his rival, a handsome woman of about forty, who, like Jane, worked as project director in her husband’s laboratory.

Pacing up and down the stage between the orchestra pit and the lecterns was Abraham Frey, who wore a bronze helmet that had a voice enhancer projecting from its right side, leaving his hands free to perform their characteristic gestures. At that moment, he was introducing Wells’s opponent, listing his many achievements over a long life devoted to the service of Knowledge. Inundated by this torrent of information, Wells was able to make out the words “Knowledge Church College,” in Oxford, where his rival had given his celebrated lectures in mathematics and physics, and where Wells himself had studied. There, conversing between its ancient walls and strolling across its verdant meadows, the two men had forged an inspiring teacher-pupil relationship, and although Wells had finally chosen biology over physics, they had continued to meet regularly, incapable of renouncing a friendship they had both deemed fruitful enough to pursue. No one could have imagined that in years to come, fate would make rivals of them. While in private this was a source of amusement to them, it in no way diminished the ferocity with which each defended his position during the many debates they had engaged in prior to the one taking place that evening, in which the church would decide which of their projects was most likely to save the world.

“And now, Your Majesty, Your Eminence, leaders of the Church of Knowledge, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the distinguished physicist and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.”

Followers of Wells’s rival broke into loud cheers as their idol’s name was announced. The tiny door to his dressing room opened, and an elderly gentlemen of about sixty emerged, waving to the public as he approached his lectern, just as Wells had done moments before. He was tall and thin, his white hair meticulously groomed, and his face possessed the languid beauty of a weary archangel. As he watched him, Wells couldn’t help feeling a sense of compassion. Clearly, Charles Dodgson would have preferred to be spending that magnificent, golden evening on one of his habitual boating excursions along the Thames rather than arguing with his former pupil about how best to save the world, yet neither man could shirk his responsibilities. They greeted each other with a stiff nod, and each stood quietly at his lectern, waiting for the moderator to begin. Frey called for silence, stroking the flank of the air with his hand.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he exclaimed in the baritone voice for which he was famous. “As we all know, our beloved universe is dying. And it has been for millions of years. Ever since the universe burst forth amidst a blazing cataclysm, it has been expanding at breakneck speed, but it has also been cooling. And that same cooling process that once nurtured life will eventually snuff it out.” He paused, plunging his hands into his jacket pockets, and started pacing up and down the stage, staring at the ground, like a man on a stroll daydreaming. “Subject to the three laws of thermodynamics,” he went on, “the galaxies are flying apart. Everything is aging. Wearing out. The end of the world is near. Stars will burn out, magic holes evaporate, temperatures will descend to absolute zero. And we humans, incapable of continuing our work in this frozen landscape . . . will become extinct.”

Frey gave a woeful sigh and began to shake his head silently, drawing out the suspense, until at last he exclaimed, almost in anger: “But we aren’t plants, or helpless creatures that must resign themselves to a tragic destiny. We are mankind! And having assimilated this terrible discovery, mankind began to wonder whether there wasn’t a way of surviving the inevitable, even the death of the universe itself. And the answer, ladies and gentlemen, was yes! But this...