A short work to shake loose a bit of writer's block on Infinitely Stranger. Nowhere near as silly as Visitor or things in trees.
Morning.
Sherlock hauls himself out of bed, rubs sleep from tired eyes. Stretches. Winces at the various clicks, pops, and twinges. He takes a deep breath; his lungs sound and feel dry, weathered and abused after years of smog and smoke. It takes longer and longer to rub sleep from his eyes whenever he wakes.
He's getting old.
The chase had not gone well, yesterday. Not for Sherlock, at least. They'd tracked Berndale to his butcher-shop killing grounds, but once the man realised who they were, he'd taken off on foot. John had kept up admirably, apparently even tackled the man to the ground, but Sherlock...
The dull pain in his left leg flares back to life as Sherlock stands from the bed. Every step, all day—a bone-deep ache he can't seem to shake, much like he can't escape the streaks of silver at his temples or the deepening wrinkles over his brow and at the corners of his mouth. The stiff joints and the protesting back. The sense of tiredness deep in his bones, a sense of wanting to slow down, stop a while.
The scent of cooking eggs wafts in from the kitchen. Sherlock hauls himself up and limps into the kitchen. John is ever a comfort in the approaching twilight.
John stands at the hob in vest, shorts, and socks. Twenty years ago, Sherlock had predicted (only to himself, naturally) that John at sixty-two would be sedentary and edging on fat in that old-man sort of way.
How wrong he was.
As age encroached, John intensified his efforts to stay in shape. Brisk two-kilometre walks became steady four-kilometre jogs became relentless ten-kilometre runs. Twenty morning push-ups doubled, redoubled. A chin-up bar appeared in his closet door.
Sherlock isn't sure if all of it is a subconscious, desperate bid to defeat time or just John ensuring that he'll never fall behind Sherlock, but whatever it is, it's working. John is trim, powerful, indomitable. Sherlock is limping, fragile, exhausted. He can't decide if he's envious, ashamed, or saddened by this.
John is saying something. Sherlock snaps out of his musings. John smiles, knowing. "I was just saying that the Admiral's invited us up for dinner tonight," he says.
The Admiral.
Yet another thing about John that defies all of Sherlock's initial understanding of the man—a chance encounter at the age of six had immersed John in a world—no, a galaxy—that most humans only dreamt, wrote, and speculated about.
John was a doctor—a ship's doctor on planetside duty, no less, attached to the crew of an enormous military spacecraft that passed through the Solar System once every two years on a regular patrol. He worked with extraterrestrials. He was terrible with human technology, not because he was a Luddite as Sherlock had initially suspected, but because he was accustomed to the holographic screens, artificial intelligences, and the instantaneous transmission made possible by quantum entanglement (he called it 'osking', short for 'oscillating', because the machines read and induced oscillations in the quantum-entangled particle at their hearts). Going back to humanity's relatively primitive devices was disorienting.
"Seeing as we have successfully closed the Berndale case, I suppose I can leave for a few days." Of course, John knows better, knows Sherlock is absolutely champing at the bit to have another look around the Kefitzot's bridge, labs, and vivarium. Null-g is kind to aging, aching joints and limbs.
John smiles. It's a strange smile, simultaneously glad and a bit... sad? Apprehensive? "I'll let him know, then. He said he had some interesting guests aboard that you might like to meet."
Sherlock doesn't doubt the "interesting" bit.
He does wonder, however, what it is that John isn't saying.
They leave for the Kefitzot at three in the morning in order to arrive on time for dinner the next day; what with the close observation of the gas and ice giants by human scientific teams these days, it's been forced to 'park' amongst the icy planetoids of the Kuiper belt to avoid detection. Even in one of the Admiral's sleek, needle-shaped 'darts', the transit takes somewhere around fifteen hours. It's easier to leave at an ungodly hour and sleep through the trip.
Not that fifteen hours to the Kuiper belt is at all slow. With current Earth technology, it'd take years to get where they're going. Instead, they spend two Earth-Sun distances (an "AU", or astronomical unit) in two and a half hours accelerating, thirty-five AUs in ten hours at cruising speed, and two AUs in two and a half hours decelerating. Sherlock knows enough physics to realise that traversing thirty-five AUs in ten hours means they're moving at just under half the speed of light. He also knows enough physics that he's aware that, at that velocity, while ten hours have elapsed for him, roughly twelve have elapsed on Earth.
He wants to think about how bloody fast that actually is, and about how much energy is involved in getting them moving at that velocity, and about where all that energy is coming from, and about those two vanished hours. He wants wonder yet again what's lurking behind the strange, secret smile still on John's lips. Instead, his body seizes the reins, drags his thoughts down to a distracted, disjointed crawl, and he naps.
Two large, transparent bubbles flank the Admiral when John and Sherlock arrive at the dining room. Inside the bubbles are huge... things. To Sherlock, they resemble upside-down jellyfish that stand nearly three metres tall. They must be important, because John suddenly gasps and the two jellyfish hastily weave tendrils into a cross-hatched shape. "Two Blinks!" John cries. "Garnet Spark!"
The jellyfish twist their tendrils into a complicated, condensed shape. "John Hamish Watson!" says the one on the left in a voice that sounds like a violin that learned to speak. "You have matured!"
"You are here!" says the other. "Was our upload incomplete?!"
John laughs. "Not quite! Some of it left imprints. Where have you been? Where did you go after you left?"
Sherlock suddenly remembers John mentioning being borrowed by walking jellyfish, many years ago. These must be the jellyfish that did the borrowing.
He doesn't do much talking during dinner. Instead, he soaks in the story that set John's life on its path.
As the conversation at the table dies down, John turns to Sherlock. The odd smile is back; Sherlock feels a sudden pang of sheer terror. Oh God. John's leaving. He's going to space and never coming back, and Sherlock will be stuck on Earth, alone. "You're not going," Sherlock snaps before John can even begin to speak. "You're not leaving me. You can't. Not after this long."
John smiles so kindly. It hurts like a sunburn. "Oh, Sherlock. Let me speak before you jump to conclusions!" he scolds gently, placing a hand on Sherlock's shoulder even though Sherlock tries to shove it off. "Listen. Sherlock, they've invited me back as ship's surgeon. They can't leave without a permanent surgeon—the last one passed away suddenly en route to the Solar System. Now that the position's op-"
Sherlock sneers to hide his pain. "How quaint," he snarls. "If it's not Queen and Country, it's Congress and Galaxy. I hope you enjoy your new source of adrenaline now that this one's dried up."
John rolls his eyes and sighs. "Sherlock. If you'd shut up for five bloody seconds, you'd hear the rest of what I have to say." His hand slides from Sherlock's shoulder to his hand; their fingers interlace. They almost never do this, not even at home; normally they're satisfied with each other's steady presence, no need for awkward physical contact. "I've been offered the surgeon's position, obviously, but another position opened up elsewhere on the Kefitzot. Admiral?"
Admiral Uriel leans in. "Sherlock, John has informed us that your capacity for the sciences rivals that of your species' finest minds. On previous visits, you have expressed considerable enthusiasm for our vivarium and the work that goes on there. As of our last port of call, our head biologist is without an apprentice. We wish to extend an invitation to you to take this position, provided you can work within our protocols or at least safeguard any potentially hazardous work you are doing."
Sherlock's heart comes flying back into his chest; very suddenly, he feels too full rather than hollow and empty. "I..." His hand tightens on his left leg, which responds with a spike of dull pain. Is it really possible, at their age? "But... your hands. My leg. My mind. You know I've been... slowing down... I... we're... we're old, John."
John scoffs. "Oh, Sherlock, you really are old, if you're second guessing this."
"Our technology is more than adequate to repair what has been eroded and damaged," one of the jellyfish (Garnet Spark, Sherlock thinks, if the glinting, reddish-brown glows flecking its inner tendrils is anything to judge by) pipes in. "We have regressed several human specimens in the past to great success."
When Sherlock gives John a wide-eyed, questioning look, John nods. "They can. I've seen it. I've done the physicals. They're so far ahead of everyone that they may as well be magical," he gushes quietly, beaming. "Come with me, Sherlock."
Sherlock thinks on it for only a moment. "I have a list," he says.
The Admiral nods. "Whatever you need. We have the space and the resources."
Five white boxes are tethered amongst a field of heather, aster, milkweed, bee balm, and dozens (if not tens of dozens) of other native Earth flowers. A young, lanky, broad-chested man drifts aimlessly over the branches of a sprawling orange tree in full bloom, watching as worker bees hum from flower to flower.
Sherlock twists languidly and raises one hand, blocking out the view of the outer wall and its brilliant star-lights arching hundreds of metres 'overhead'. The backs of his hands are smooth and unblemished; his lungs are unfettered from the accumulation of decades of London fug. The pain in his leg is little more than a faint, unpleasant memory. He'll never quite tire of the way it feels when his joints respond smoothly and without protest to his demands.
"Almost through here, Sherlock. Where do you want them?"
Sherlock tips his head up and spies John drifting with one arm looped through the handle of a tall spade, the other hand resting on his hip. He's shirtless and bronzed, the starburst scar at his shoulder glinting rosily in the gentle dip beneath his left clavicle. Sherlock had been tickled pink to learn that his best friend was a strawberry blonde under all the sun-bleached gold and aged silver. Seeing him this way, Sherlock can almost imagine him in the dusty Afghan desert.
"Put them wherever you want, John. The bees will find them regardless."
John chuckles. He twists and snags a floating wisteria by the burlap-wrapped root ball and tugs it to one of the holes he's just dug. After many, many sessions in the vivarium with Sherlock, he's gotten quite good at packing the soil around the plants in null gravity. "So tell me again what you're studying."
"The effects of the absence of gravity on plant vascular systems and honeybee behaviour," Sherlock replies. There's other work, too, on superconductors and higher-volume quantum-entangled communications connections, but his bees and his garden are the proverbial apple of his eye.
The Langstroth hives have been an excellent control, with their neatly-constructed frames. Watching a swarm alight on a passing bromeliad epiphyte had been fascinating; more fascinating still had been watching the new hive grow. Instead of draping curtains of honeycomb, the hive resembles nothing so much as a hexagon-laced Golgi apparatus, weaving and twisting in on itself in a roughly-spherical labyrinth of wax and honey.
He is still gathering data on how the untethered colony's workers have or haven't adapted their communications for dealing with a rotating hive.
"Do you ever want to go back?" John asks as he drifts by. He reaches out; Sherlock grasps his hand and they swing slowly around each other, like a pair of bolas. "To London, I mean."
Sherlock shrugs. "At some point, undoubtedly. Soon? It depends. I've not seen a whole lot yet; a few planets, spaceports... at some point, I wish to spend more than three daycycles somewhere. There's so much to see and do."
John grins. "Glad I asked you along, then?"
The look on Sherlock's face as he contemplates the alternative must be alarming, because John captures his other hand and squeezes both reassuringly. "You must never go where I cannot follow, John."
"Hey. We're in this together, you and me. Quantum entangled: that's us."
Sherlock smiles. "Yes. Yes, it is."
Not an ending to this universe; there will undoubtedly be stories preceding and succeeding this tale's point in time. I'm enjoying writing it.
Again, jellyfish aliens are all Alastair Reynolds' work. I'm just playing with them.