Iterations and other stories (collection)

Who was I to tell him he was dreaming? “You’ve looked everywhere there is to look.”

“We haven’t looked outside of the Dome.”

“Outside? There’s nothing outside, lad.”

“There has to be.”

“Why?” I’d never heard such nonsense.

“There just has to be, that’s all.”

Well, you can’t argue with that kind of logic. “Even if there is,” I said, “there’s no way to go outside, so that’s that.”

“Yes there is,” said Eric. “Mr. Withers found a door, way up in North York. It’s all rusted shut. If we took some of the tools from here we might be able to open it.”

Well, the boy insisted on going, and I couldn’t let him hike all that way alone, could I? We set out the next day. It’d been years since I’d been to Dome’s edge. They called it Steels Avenue up there, which seemed an appropriate name for where the iron Dome touched the ground. Sure enough, there was a door. I felt sure somebody would have had the good sense to jam it closed, so I didn’t worry when I gave it a healthy pry with a crowbar. Damned if the thing didn’t pop right open. We stepped cautiously through.

There was magic out there. A huge ball of light hung up over our heads. Tall and proud brown columns stretched as far as the eye could see. On top they were like frozen tire: orange and red and yellow. Little things were flying to and fro—and they were singing! Suddenly Eric fell to his knees. “Look, Mr. Curator! Maple leafs!” There were millions of them, covering the ground. More fluttered down from above, thin and veined and beautiful. Eric looked up at me. “This must have been what it was like When Times Were Good: people living outside with the maple leafs. I think we should live out here, Mr. Curator.” I laughed and cried and hugged the boy. We turned our backs on the dome and marched forward.

When it came time to fly a flag over our new town everyone agreed it should be the maple leaf, forever.

You See But You Do Not Observe

Winner of France’s Le Grand Prix de I’lmaginaire for Best Foreign Short Story of 1996

Winner of the CompuServe SF&F Forum’s HOMer Award for Best Short Story of the Year

Author’s Introduction

Okay, time for a big confession: I’d only read one Sherlock Holmes story (“Silver Blaze,” at age 13) when Mike Resnick sent me an E-mail commissioning a story for his anthology Sherlock Holmes in Orbit.

But there was plenty of time before the story was due, and my lovely wife is a huge Holmes fan, so I said yes, then dived into not only reading the entire canon, but also watching various film and TV adaptations of Holmes.

I felt kinship with Arthur Conan Doyle, constantly receiving exhortations to bring back Holmes; on a smaller scale, I was inundated with similar requests to go back to writing about Afsan, the hero of my Quintaglio trilogy.

“You See But You Do Not Observe” missed making it to the Hugo Award ballot by just four nominations. In 1996, my The Terminal Experiment won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year. Rather than publishing an excerpt from that book in the anthology Nebula Awards 31, I chose instead to be represented there by this story.

* * *

I had been pulled into the future first, ahead of my companion. There was no sensation associated with the chronotransference, except for a popping of my ears which I was later told had to do with a change in air pressure. Once in the 21st century, my brain was scanned in order to produce from my memories a perfect reconstruction of our rooms at 22 IB Baker Street. Details that I could not consciously remember or articulate were nonetheless reproduced exactly: the flock-papered walls, the bearskin hearthrug, the basket chair and the armchair, the coal-scuttle, even the view through the window—all were correct to the smallest detail.

I was met in the future by a man who called himself Mycroft Holmes. He claimed, however, to be no relation to my companion, and protested that his name was mere coincidence, although he allowed that the fact of it was likely what had made a study of my partner’s methods his chief avocation. I asked him if he had a brother called Sherlock, but his reply made little sense to me: “My parents weren’t that cruel.”

In any event, this Mycroft Holmes—who was a small man with reddish hair, quite unlike the stout and dark ale of a fellow with the same name I had known two hundred years before— wanted all details to be correct before he whisked Holmes here from the past. Genius, he said, was but a step from madness, and although I had taken to the future well, my companion might be quite rocked by the experience.