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

“It’s a good story,” said Hector, eventually.

They sat in silence a while longer.

“And this object, stuck in the soil below us,
spoke
to my Dad, did it?” Hector asked, eventually. “It communicated with him? Warned him?”

Tom didn’t answer.

“And,” Hector went on, finding at last, with a sense of gratitude to the gods of the subconscious, reserves of scorn inside himself after all, and able to give his words a withering tone, “and this intelligent super-heavy whatever-it-is is happy just to sit embedded in a huge fragment of a broken planet is it? I mean, why didn’t it swerve and avoid the earth, if it’s so intelligent?”

“We’ve most of us had visions,” said Tom, mildly. “Since we came here, although none as detailed as Hector’s. Why didn’t it swerve? Who knows? Maybe this is part of its alien life-cycle. You know, a mole’s gotta dig in the earth, salmon’ve gotta swim upstream to spawn, this thing’s gotta crash into planets and embed itself, destroying them in the process. I don’t know. You don’t know.”

Hector stood up, reaching for anger, although actually all he felt was fear, the other’s emotion’s close kin. “But I
do
know,” he said. “I know you’re all wacko. There was a quake last night — big deal, it’s California for fuck’s sake. I
know
that I’ll get in my hire car and drive back to LA and get a room in a flicking hotel. Tell my Dad I’ll call later.”

“Go for a drive, sure,” said Tom, with infuriating patronage. “Only, belt up, and take care. The roads’ll get steep sooner than you realize. Roads you think should be flat’ll get steep.”

“Right,” said Hector, meaning
no
way. Meaning
never.

The light was thinning, the fog growing darker. It was dusk. Hector could see the dial on Tom’s watch, on his wrist, sitting in his lap, on top of the pistol; it said eight-oh-five. He must have slept right through the day, which unnerved him, because he had thought it was morning. Still, he could drive through the night if he had to.

Yet he stood there hovering, on the porch.

“Things,” he tried, “don’t feel any different to yesterday.”

“We’re on a curious ellipse, orbitally speaking,” said Tom, looking into the fog, as if talking to himself. “I’ve been trying to calculate it, but it’s tricky to do the numbers. I reckon we’ll move away from the sun for seven months, and up from the ecliptic, but not too far, not so far that the fog would freeze solid. Or so we hope. But then we’ll swing back in and down, and things’ll warm up. We need to plan to have the first children by then.”

“Yeah. Right,” said Hector. “I’m getting into my car now.” “You go ahead,” said Tom.

“I will. I’m driving away.”

“Have a drive around, sure. But be sure you can find your way back.”

“I’m going now,” said Hector. But he was still standing there on the porch, with the fog in every direction away from the house, as if the ranch had been wrapped in mother-of-pearl.

THE MYSTERIOUS IOWANS by Paul Di Filippo

Most of Verne’s novels over the next ten years, 1877-1886, have largely been forgotten. Only a few of their titles, listed here in English, will raise more than a little recognition —
The Black Indies
(1877),
A Captain at Fifteen
(1878),
The Begum’s Fortune
(1879),
The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China
(1879),
The Steam House
(1880),
The Giant Raft
(1881),
Robinson’s School
(1882),
The Green Ray
(1882),
Kéraban the Inflexible
(1883),
The Southern Star
(1884),
The Archipelago on Fire
(1884),
The Waif of the
Cynthia, written with André Laurie (1885) and
The Lottery Ticket
(1885). Perhaps only
Mathias Sandorf
(1885), in the style of Alexandre Dumas is remembered, and this includes another mysterious scientist, Dr Antekirtt, who has a super-scientific castle on a remote island. Possibly this work was enough to inspire Verne again because in 1886 he created another of his great characters, Robur in
Robur le conquérant,
also called
The Clipper of the Clouds.
Robur, like Nemo, is on a vengeful mission against the world, except that whereas Nemo achieves his aims with his submarine, Robur works through a massive flying machine, the
Albatross.

By the time of this novel Verne’s attitude to scientific advance was changing. He still saw the need to progress but was aware of its dangers and warned that we needed to move cautiously.

Robur, who would return as an even greater avenger
in The Master of the World
(1904), knew that mankind was not ready for advanced science. Paul Di Filippo takes that cue for the following story.

“I am inclined to think that in the future the world will not have many more novels in which mind problems will be solved by the imagination. It may be the natural feeling of an old man with a hundred books behind him, who feels that he has written out his subject, but I really feel as though the writers of the present day and the past time who have allowed their imaginations to play upon mind problems, have, to use a colloquialism, nearly filled the bill.”

— Jules Verne, “Solution of

Mind Problems by the Imagination.”

On the morning of 24 May 1898, Mr Bingham Wheatstone disembarked from the transcontinental train famously dubbed “The Grey Ghost” for its swift and whisper-quiet mode of propulsion, alighting at the very doorstep of the city known far and wide as Lincolnopolis, the capitol of the enigmatic sovereign empire known as Lincoln Island, a dominion incongruously situated in the vast heartland of the United States of America, bounded roughly by the borders of what had once been the state of Iowa.

Descending the automatically unfolding steps of the streamlined railcar, Wheatstone glanced about the several platforms of the Lincolnopolis station for a brief moment. He saw a bustling scene, as thousands of brightly dressed visitors and natives mingled beneath the great vitrine-roofed, adamantium-girdered enclosure, which dwarfed any Old World cathedral in its spaciousness. Despite a constant flow of trains, the air within the station remained fragrant and wholesome, thanks to the clean gravito-magnetic engines that pulled the various expresses.

Although a young man of only twenty-nine, and thus too youthful to more than dimly recall the era of coal-powered propulsion that had been the rule up until 1875,Wheatstone was a student of history sufficiently well-versed to realize that such a pristine environment had not always been associated with rail travel. His parents, for instance, would have been forced to endure the soot and smut and cinders belched by coal-burning steam engines.

But all such inconveniences had been eliminated by a genius named Cyrus Smith, President-for-Life of Lincoln Island, and his many capable comrades-in-invention.

Hefting his single valise, Wheatstone leisurely traversed the space separating him from the nearest egress, threading his way among the many exotic specimens of humanity thronging the platforms. Sheiks from the Holy Land, Zulus and Watusis from darkest Africa, Laplanders, Muscovites, Mongols and Manchurians.

Lincolnopolis as a general rule during any period of the calendar attracted numerous representatives of every nation on the globe, diplomats, tourists and business folk eager to experience the wonders of the city or to conduct negotiations or to facilitate trade. But this day was unlike any other, and had occasioned even greater numbers of foreign visitors. For this very day marked the inauguration of the grand festivities connected with the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of Lincoln Island.

But even more startling than the cosmopolitan mix of humans was the presence of innumerable ape-servitors, all neatly garbed in red vests and pillbox hats, busy trundling steamer trunks, polishing brightwork, and sweeping the immaculate tiled floors. These intelligent quadrumanes belonged to the same race as the legendary Jupiter, the anthropoid servant who had been a loyal member of the household on the original Lincoln Island. Jupiter and his tribe had perished in the destruction of the ocean-girt Lincoln Island, but his cousins had been discovered on neighbouring Tabor Island in subsequent expeditions to that region, adopted and brought back to North America. Although not widely employed outside sovereign Iowa, the quadrumanes formed an essential component of that nation’s working class.

As Wheatstone drew closer to his chosen exit, the travellers bunched into a line focused on the portal, one of many such queues. When he drew even with the customs station, holding his credentials expectantly, he immediately encountered the famous efficiency of the Lincoln Island government.

Teams of inspectors, their impressive white linen uniforms featuring the governmental crest that depicted the starfish-shaped outline of the original Lincoln Island, were rapidly and dispassionately going through the luggage of each visitor. While this procedure was underway, another official verified the identity of the person seeking entrance via his ordinator console.

Soon it was Wheatstone’s turn. He surrendered his valise and handed over his passport. He watched as the ordinator operator — a competent-looking young fellow with a spray of freckles across his face lending a schoolboy charm to his person — expertly stroked the complicated controls studding the surface of the big mahogony cabinet that bore its proud brass plate identifying it as a “Saml. Clemens & Co. Mark Two” model.

Once the unique code attached to Wheatstone’s citizenship in the USA had been translated into a format sensible to the ordinator’s machine intelligence, the information was transmitted telegraphically to the central clearinghouse of such data. In less than a minute, the response returned, activating a piece of attached equipment that featured a scribing pen moving over a continuous sheet of paper. With remarkable speed, the pen engraved a likeness of Wheatstone with all the verisimilitude of any illustration from, say,
The London Illustrated News!
Following the portrait, the pen dictated some text.

The ordinator technician ripped the inscribed paper off its roll and studied the picture and text, frequently glancing at Wheatstone’s visage for purposes of comparison. At last he seemed satisfied, turning to Wheatstone with a smile and a handshake.

“Welcome to Lincoln Island, Mr Wheatstone. I note that you are a journalist.”

“Yes indeed. I am employed by the
Boston Herald.
I have been dispatched to report on your grand anniversary celebrations.”

“You’ll need a press pass then. One further moment, please.”

“Of course.”

The second response to the ordinator operator’s fiddling took but an additional ninety seconds, at the end of which a solid
thunk
signalled the arrival of a capsule delivered through the pneumatic-tube system that threaded all of Lincolnopolis. The capsule disgorged a wallet-sized, flexible sheet of adamantium inscribed using a diamond stylus with the particulars of Wheatstone’s employment and the terms of his liberty in Lincolnopolis.

“Once you are settled into your hotel,” said the customs official, “present this at the Bureau of Public Information at the intersection of Grant Boulevard and Glenarvan Way. They will have further instructions and counsel for you.”

Wheatstone took the flexible rectangle of adamantium. “Thank you very much for your help.”The reporter collected his valise, neatly repacked, and strode off toward the broad exterior doors of the rail station. Within a few seconds, he found himself outside the crystal transportation palace.

Avenues lined with stalwart buildings in marble, granite and travertine stretched away radially from the hub of the train station. The wide sidewalks were thronged with bright-eyed, happy, strong-sinewed citizens of both sexes, all clad in pleasant modes of costume suitable for the Iowan spring climate; with awestruck tourists goggling at the sights; and with scuttling quadrumanes busy running errands for their masters.

The avenues themselves boasted a steady traffic of wheeled vehicles of every elaboration, all propelled by clean magnetogravitic engines. The slices of sky visible above the urban canyons featured the occasional passing light aircraft. So far the sciences of Lincoln Island had managed to permit the construction only smallish atmospheric craft capable of hosting one or two riders at most, and not useful for much more than aerial observation or pleasure jaunts. But there was already talk in such gazettes as
Scientific Iowan
of scaling up these vessels into long-range behemoths that would revolutionize travel.

As Wheatstone hailed a passing jitney, he was already mentally casting the lead paragraphs of his first story, a paean to this tiny nation.

“Hotel Amiens, please.”

“Sure thing, mister!”

The Hotel Amiens proved to be a superior establishment, from its natatorium and billiard rooms to its corps of quadrumane bellhops. Every room featured ordinator-mediated communication outlets and piped music from the central Lincolnopolis chamber orchestra, which performed twenty-four hours a day, thanks to an extensive complement of musicians.