The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (49 page)

“Even the fish that were
most common are now much reduced, although the conservation measures mean that
mackerel and tuna and the great so-called product fish, anchovies and sardines,
are much more successful these days,” Verne told him. “They’re welcome
passengers when the seas are rough, but we don’t trouble them much unless our
sharks are hungry.”

“The true deep ocean is
something I cannot show you personally,” Nemo the Nautilus said as they walked
out of the reef area and back towards the surface. “But my work there is bent
on discovering the life and history of the oceans and the geology of the Earth
beneath.”

“Each of you are one of
a kind,” Riba said. “Why aren’t there more?”

“An Island and a
Nautilus are not easily made,” Verne said. “The cost of Forging is always high.
But we are worth the taxes, I hope you find. Together we form the marine
conservation and research unit of the Earth. From the deepest to the most
shallow, wherever the water is salt and creatures live off the sea we are
there. And it is our intention that the oceans here, the only saltwater oceans
in this system, possibly in existence, survive this encounter of Isol’s. For
that we cannot have a war. In war our energies would have to dissipate and we
must choose a side — the Forged or Earth. We are bound to the Earth, how could
we fight against it? Maybe some would, and so you see it would never be a
simple matter of the Earth Forged leaving for new worlds, as Isol wants to
promise and your media wishes to say. We will never leave the ocean. And we are
not your enemy.”

They had come outside
again on the surface and took Verne’s smart car. It drove them to the far side
of the Island and Riba saw the colonies of seabirds that girt the Island’s
windward side, vast cliffs of them clustered against the protecting shield of
the mountainside.

Riba could stand on this
island, and speak to it. This, above all, he could not get over. The Island was
a habitat and a researcher, a scientist and a human being, a creature of the
ocean who was land and sanctuary, a dreamer — so many things at once. He looked
at Verne and then at Nemo as they returned to the car, the Island and the
Monster of the Deep, walking together. He looked up through clear skies to the
stars and the quick sweep of gleaming satellites. Out here there was no light
except the small ones marking the car and the galaxy was visible, milky and
rich across the roof of his world. How small was this ocean, and how large, he
thought, with only the Forged themselves to shepherd us out there into the
vastness of the true sea.

“I’ll write your
article,” he said, joining the old men in the car. “What’s the angle?”

“Jules Verne himself
wrote not only to spread the wonder of scientific knowledge but also to raise
awareness of its dangers,” the Island said, through Verne the Hand. “Not that
knowledge was dangerous, but that misapplication of it would always have
serious consequences, both for the person who applied it and for the world. He
lived at the beginning of the age when humans were to get their hands on the
greatest powers and the greatest wealth. Many evils we might consider footnotes
in history were current at the time — slavery among them. I propose that you
consider presenting our information in the light of this perspective: to treat
properly with any alien world we must strive to understand ourselves and the
way that we create our own, and that to ensure our survival we must apply
ourselves closely to the study of threats that lie both without and within.”

“Doesn’t sound like the
kind of stuff that grabs the headlines,” Riba said.

“The headlines are up to
you,” Verne said as the car took them through the jungle back towards the
house. The moon was out and the skies clear. Tupac shone like a star close to
its side from her place in orbit. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

Riba was already
planning his full-virtual Time magazine spread of
The Adventurers’ League,
never
mind his brief half-life in the global newsnets when it came to setting out the
full story of Isol’s trip and what she’d found. For good magazine sales you
need a stable, literate population who want to talk. Wars were always good for
that, but he could live with the peace, he thought, as he followed Verne up the
steps and into the Club. He could live with the idea of noble adventurers on a
secret island, eternally afloat, watching out for everyone.

“Hey, do I get
membership here?”

“That depends on what
you write, Mr Riba. It all depends . . .”

With
The Mysterious Island
we see the end of an especially
productive period of Verne’s writing. Few of his next sequence of novels would
capture the imagination in the same way as
20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea
and
Around the World in Eighty Days.
Verne seems almost to have lost his
faith in mankind. Unlike his castaways in
The Mysterious Island,
who use
their ingenuity to survive, the survivors on an open raft in
Le Chancelor
(1874/5)
resort almost to cannibalism and murder before they are saved.
Michael
Strogoff
(1876), about the war between Russia and the Tartars and envisaging
a Tartar invasion of Siberia, was popular in France and remains well known if
little read today.

With his next novel,
Verne’s growing misanthropy turned upon science. Until now all of Verne’s
scientific novels had been assiduously researched to ensure painstaking
accuracy.
Hector Servadac
(1877), on the other hand, is clearly a
fantasy. The Earth is struck by a comet and a chunk of it, including parts of
Gibraltar and North Africa, are carried away into space complete with its
occupants. The scientific consequences of such a collision are ignored, and the
attempt to return to the Earth by balloon is equally preposterous. At the end
it is suggested that the whole episode is a dream. In fact the book, which also
contains some
of Verne’s most racist views,
has to be read in the same vein as
Dr Ox’s
Experiment,
and that is as a satire upon isolationism and prejudice. It is a
book that tells us far more about Verne
himself and his views of the
world than almost any of his other works.

The strange dreamlike
quality of the novel has beet; captured wonderfully in the following story
which looks deeper into the nature of reality.

Hector flew in. It’s OK,
he caught breakfast on the plane He doesn’t need anything to eat, he’s good.
But there was a wait at the hire car desk, and the wait brought speckle of
sweat to his face and torso. His flesh, having been starve( of Californian
sunshine, and having been seduced by French food for a year, had assumed the
colour and consistency o mozzarella. He tried this line, self-deprecating and
he hope( witty, on the woman seated next to him on his connecting flight. He
smiled, sticking his lower jaw out and showing his teeth. His teeth, he
admitted to her, had become Europeanized during this last year. That red wine,
that ink dark little coffee in the dainty little cups, those
gitanes,
the
very air in Europe, it tends to stain. Stains the dentine There are reasons,
you see, why everybody in Europe ha such crappy teeth. But what can you do? And
you know what? he asked the woman in the seat next to him. Avignon has more
Italian restaurants than French. I hadn’t expected that. And Montpellier has
more
American
restaurants that anything else.

“You mean,” the woman
asked, “McDonalds?”

But Hector could tell
she wasn’t really interested.

“Some,” he said. “But,
you know, Steak Houses. Of course it’s a big university town, Montpellier.
Students love to eat American, fast food, steaks. That’s the reason I was there
actually, doing some work at the university.”

But she wasn’t interested,
she wouldn’t be drawn, and when she started talking herself it became apparent
that she was married, that she had a kid, and that Hector was on a hiding to
nothing. He smiled and nodded as she talked, but not sticking his jaw right
out, not the big beaming grin, just a polite smile, and a polite nod, and
behind his eyes he was thinking, you could at least wear a damned ring on your
finger, you could at least give me some heads-up.

At the airport he had to
queue at the hire car desk. He told himself that a year in France had
accustomed him to queuing; but as he stood there, looking through the glass
walls of the terminal at the wide Californian view, the perfect blue of the
Californian sky, the cars with their broad panelled paintwork glistening in the
sunshine as if wet, some of his American impatience started to return. He
fidgeted. He started sweating a little. Anger started warming inside him,
although of course he kept it in check. At the head of the queue he was told
that there would be a twenty-minute wait before he could be given the keys to
his hire car. At least twenty minutes, we’re sorry sir.

“Why?”

“There’s been an
unforeseen eventuality, sir,” said the clerk. “I do apologise, sir. We can
offer you a coupon for a complimentary breakfast in
Home Cookin’
whilst
you wait, sir.”

“No, that’s OK,” said
Hector. “I had breakfast on the plane, I’m good.”

When he finally got his
car, when he finally drove out, he got lost on his route to the ranch.

The car’s air-con was
either too cold, or else not cooling enough. He kept fiddling with it. He made
a pit stop, picking up a couple of cans and something to smoke, and then drove
on out, drove east into the desert. The signs of human habitation became
poorer, sketchier; the gaps between buildings opened up, and soon he was
leaving the major roads and driving lonely tarmac under the cyanide blue of a
perfect Californian day. He fiddled continually with the radio tuner as he
drove. None of the stations seemed capable of playing two good tunes one after
the other. One good song, one shit song, that seemed to be the playlist of
every music station within broadcast range.

He got lost. It was
probably deliberate, on an unconscious level. He told himself this with some
self-satisfaction at his powers of auto-psychoanalysis; getting lost was his
own passive-aggressive response to his father’s passive-aggressive actions, his
own subconscious way of saying “how am I supposed to find your fucking ranch?
It’s in the middle of
nowhere.”
To sell a perfectly good house, and buy
a stretch of desert miles from anywhere — how could that be construed as
anything
but
passive aggression on his father’s part? Hector circled so
completely, still, even at thirty-eight, in the symbolic orbital of his father,
or rather circled the space his father occupied in his own cognitive map of the
universe, that he could only understand this action (selling a house, buying a
ranch) in relation to himself. What other explanation could there be? Dad was
free to buy and sell what he liked,
of course,
he was free to dispose of
his home, which only happened to be the house in which Hector had grown up, the
house in which his mother had died —
of course
he could do that, if he
wanted to. He could buy some waterless ranch miles from anyway, if he wanted
to. He could join some cult, or whatever the hell it was, and spend all his
money on subterranean whatever cables, if he wanted to. But why would he want
to? Except to piss with Hector’s head? And the lady on the radio was singing
the song that told him, Hector, that he — made — her —
feel,
that he
made her
feel,
like a nat-ur-al woman.

Hector sang along. But
the next song was some Nashville crap, and he fiddled with the tuner again.

He stopped in a small
town, in which there didn’t seem to be a single building more than one storey
high. He asked in the drugstore for directions, but the guy serving there
couldn’t help him. He stood on the main street for long minutes,
in the heat, looking vaguely about, thinking maybe a cop could help him, but he
couldn’t see a cop.

Above him the sky was a
deep blue, a dark lacquered blue upon which a handful of high feathery clouds
looked like scuffs. And there, tiny as a bug, was a plane, drawing two tiny,
scratchy lines after it, crawling over the sky. Just visible was its boomerang
wingspan, its missile fuselage. It looked like a Christmas ornament.