Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“Ahhh,” said James.

“This way, Mr. James.” Miss Miller led him toward a staircase with only a narrow aisle on the iron steps between more unruly stacks of books.

The next two hours were an odd education for Henry James.

He would have never found Professor James Moriarty’s works or any references to him had he been left to his own devices, as he’d planned so furtively to be, but Miss Miller tracked down everything the United States Library of Congress had on the now famous—or infamous—professor.

The first two books she brought him were the much-mentioned The Dynamics of an Asteroid —two hundred and nine pages of impenetrable equations with very few words, just as advertised—and then a thinner book, the 68-page A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem . The latter had been published way back in 1871, the same year, according to a brief note in the back, that James Nolan Moriarty received his twin degrees, in mathematics and applied physics, from University College, Dublin. The book had been released by a small Dublin publishing house which James had never heard of and was dedicated to Carl Gottfried Neumann, a professor at the University of Leipzig.

James had never heard of Professor Neumann, but Miss Miller assured him that he was an important figure, mentioned frequently in German and other foreign journals of mathematics, and even brought him Neumann’s book Das Dirichtlet’sche Prinzip in seiner Anwendung auf die Reimann’schen Flächen to prove it.

James might have paused to wonder why a student at Trinity College in Dublin was so advanced that he dedicated his first book of mathematical theory to a professor in Leipzig, but instead he explained to Miss Miller that he was primarily interested in biographical information about Professor Moriarty—and any photographs of the professor, if those were handy.

He could see the curiosity in her eyes, but Miss Miller was far too much the professional to inquire Are you thinking of writing a book about the man who killed Sherlock Holmes? She hurried off to find more references in various science sections of the maze of stacks, shelves, and locked rooms that was the Library of Congress.

In less than an hour, James had every reference the Library had on the man Sherlock Holmes, in print, had called the Napoleon of Crime and, in person, had insisted was a figment of his imagination.

Even dates and places of birth did not agree. One Who’s Who in European Mathematics from 1884 stated that Professor James Moriarty—no middle name given—author of the Treatise on the Binomial Theorem , had been born in Dublin in 1846. A reference book for the University College, Dublin, which showed a Professor James N. Moriarty as being a professor of mathematics there from 1872 until 1878, gave the man’s year of birth as 1849 and the place of birth as Greystones, which Miss Miller helped James look up in an atlas of Ireland and which turned out to be a small village between Dublin and Wicklow.

So if Moriarty were alive today, if he hadn’t died in 1891 at Reichenbach Falls, how old would he be—47 or 44?

The next shock for James was when he found the copyright date of The Dynamics of an Asteroid , published by an imprint he’d never heard of in London—1890. Even if Moriarty had been born at the later date given, he would have been 41 years old in the year the book was published. Old, from the little that Henry James understood, for a mathematician’s first major publication. Some don at Oxford had once told James, in passing, that mathematicians such as Charles Dodgson, known to the world as Lewis Carroll, usually published their best work when they were younger than thirty.

Thumbing through the literal hieroglyphics—to James—of the mathematical equations of The Dynamics of an Asteroid , he found himself muttering aloud, “If I only had the vaguest idea of what this volume is about . . .”

“I’ve heard some of the visiting scientists discuss it,” said Miss Miller, thinking that he had addressed her with the question. “It seems that the asteroid in question creates what is known to astronomers and mathematicians as a Three-Body-Problem. Take any two celestial bodies, and their gravitational attraction, tidal effect on the other, tumbling, three-dimensional orientations, and so forth can be plotted with both modern and classical mathematical techniques. But add a third body . . . evidently then the tumbling, orientation, and even trajectory of an asteroid becomes all but incalculable. Professor James Moriarty’s great renown in this book came, if I understand the scientists and mathematicians correctly, from pointing out what cannot be calculated.”

“Very interesting,” said James, although her summary of others’ analysis was useless to him. After a moment he spoke again, “So it appears that there is no chance of finding a photograph of Professor Moriarty.”

“Please come with me, Mr. James.” Miss Miller—James tried not to think of her unfortunate first name—marched ahead of him with elbows pumping, a soldier going off to war.

They had to climb into what had to be the dusty attic of the Capitol (although not under the great dome as far as James could tell) and Miss Miller had to unlock three more doors before they came to a room filled with thousands of carefully filed journals.

“Mathematics . . . European . . . conferences . . .” muttered Miss Miller to herself, gesturing behind her back for James to take the only seat available in the room. A low chair at what seemed to be a student’s desk in the center of the impossibly cluttered room. James was certain that he would have nightmares about this Library for years to come.

“Here!” she cried at last and brought a German journal with a title too long and umlauted and Fraktured for James to bother trying to decipher. She opened to page thirty-six and stabbed her finger down at a line of eight middle-aged men standing in a line facing the camera. The caption, in German, beneath the photograph said “Conference on Advanced Mathematics and Astronomical Physics, University of Leipzig, July, 1892.”

The names were listed under each man, but James didn’t need to read them. He saw Moriarty at once, on the far right—the same balding head, straggling dark hair, reptilian forward thrusting of his neck, and hint of tongue showing between the thin, pale lips. It was precisely the photograph that he’d illicitly taken from Holmes’s jacket and peeked at that very morning. Holmes must have torn it out of a copy of this very journal.

“Professor James N. Moriarty, London.” No university affiliation given. But the date of the conference—July, 1892. More than a full year after Holmes and the newspaper accounts recorded Moriarty as dying at Reichenbach Falls in May of 1891!

Satisfied that he would find out no more about this particular Lazarus at the Library of Congress, James went through the motions of taking a few notes and assured the apologetic Miss Miller that no, no, despite the apparent paucity of information available, she had been of inestimable help to him. Inestimable .

He stood and turned to go then but could not even find his way through the attic to the stairs. Miss Miller inquired as to which exit from the Capitol he wished to use.

“The main . . . front . . . entrance, I believe,” said James.

“Wonderful,” said the helpful Miss Miller. “You’ll get some glimpses of the actual Capitol.”

She was his Aeneas down several flights of stairs, around endless stacks of books that would have stopped him in his tracks, through the long, high, cluttered corridors, and then out into the formal marble vaults and under the majestic dome of the United States Capitol Building itself. Henry James was impressed not by the colossal Roman size of the structure, but by its almost Grecian white purity. And the early afternoon light shining down onto the marble floors was lovely.