The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (42 page)

Fresh from
Around the World in Eighty Days,
Verne returned to the character of Captain Nemo, believed dead at the end of
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. L’île mystérieuse
or
The Mysterious Island
had had a long genesis. Verne had written an early version before he wrote
20,000 Leagues,
and this was essentially a novel of castaways who survive on an island by using their ingenuity and scientific knowledge. It was derived, to a large degree, from one of Verne’s favourite books,
Swiss
Family
Robinson
(1813) by Johann Wyss. By the time he returned to it, though, Verne was able to weave into it characters from other novels. We find that the survivors of a balloon accident on a remote island have some kind of mysterious protector who turns out, at the very end of the novel, to be none other than Captain Nemo. He reveals, in his final moments, the truth about his origins and motives. With his death the castaways obey his last wish and scuttle the
Nautilus
which bears its body to a watery grave.
We
have already seen from Mallory’s story that there might be another interpretation of Nemo’s final days. Now we look ahead to the inspiration that the character and story gave to future generations.

Riba leant out of the window and looked up. His body was at an awkward twist because he dare not let go of the ledge. It was twelve floors down to the pavement. Just above him and to his right, outside the Newsdesk window, the summons’ posts of the Avian Messenger Service jutted out of the brickwork. One of them was occupied by the sturdy form of an external maintenance Parrokeet who was testing the wirework for the new satellite dish the editor had just had installed. The other two were empty.

Riba pulled his head in and ran a hand through his hair reflectively. The posts and local environs were crusted with foul-smelling bird muck which had a habit of flaking loose. He lived in dread of inhaling the stuff, but he seemed to have escaped this once.

“Go stir up some trouble, Riba, you’re spoiling the view.” Slattery, who was supposed to be writing the minority sports column, had his feet up on his desk. A printed magazine was laid over his face as he leant back in his chair, arms behind his head.

“Something’s going on,” Riba told him, stuffing his hands into his pockets and leaning against the wall so that he could look out across the city towards Downing Street. “I can tell by the way everything’s flying.”

Slattery snorted. “Mmn, yes, maybe in some uncharted corner of the universe there still exists some angle on the day’s big story that’s not entirely shredded and bedded. The small pets of the world may be bursting to give you their reactions to the reactions on the reactions so far. I can see it now Impossible Space Journey — a hamster speaks.
I was in my wheel, you know, just doing a few laps, when suddenly . . .”

But Riba was already out of the door and moving out of the paper’s network footprint. In a café a half a mile distant he sat down and opened his Abacand — a handheld device of infinite practical use. Using the money from his last major investigative assignment he pump-primed his account with DarkNet, the non-governmental AI communications service.

He drank his way through four espressos and oiled, smoothed and bribed his way through all but a handful of dollars in the next few hours. Finally, as lights began to come on across the city, he felt that lifting of the hairs on the back of his neck as an old contact from the Forged Uluru network came on line. Using the café’s integral holographic units they projected their avatar into the empty chair opposite Riba’s.

Forged people, whose bodies might be far distant or in a form not suitable for talking, in order to manifest themselves in the form of Original, or Unevolved human beings, used Avatars as a matter of course in order to communicate more effectively. Their appearance conventionally revealed much about the personality behind their design. This one took the form of an ancient Chinese man with a pot belly. He wore orange robes, had a shaved head, and smoked a meerschaum pipe that gave off a fierce blast of smoke every so often, like the funnel of a tug-boat. Riba knew this avatar, even though he knew nothing about who it really was, and he was used to the fact that it never spoke. Instead it gave him an amused smile and sent his Abacand the time and departure point of a trans-Atlantic flight. Then, with an extra-large puff of smoke, it did the genie-thing and vanished.

The notes included a brief description of a person. Riba had used this contact before, when it gained him access to a file that revealed the identities of a half a dozen businessmen involved in financing interplanetary piracy. Upon receiving this new instruction he immediately called in a couple of favours from other journalists to borrow enough money to buy a ticket and by the time Slattery was ploughing his way through the volleyball scores Riba was stepping aboard the helium airship
Byzantium,
bound for New York.

The
Byzantium
was a passenger craft ideally suited to extending journey time beyond the practical and into the realms of affluence. No vehicle appealed less to Riba personally but, if it led him to definite information on the peculiar circumstances of Voyager Lonestar Isol’s return to Earth space, then it was the best transport in the world. That this return was a matter that required serious investigation was beyond question.

The Voyager was an early type of Forged human being, an engineered mind in an engineered body which was suited for the long years, great speeds and incredible tedium of interstellar exploration. Her Manifest Photograph was currently showing on every newscast in the system. Riba flinched instinctively every time he saw it. Isol looked like fifty different kinds of assassin bug wedded to the toughest machinery money could buy. She was as inhuman as he could imagine, on the outside at least. On the way to catch his flight he did his best to forget it although it was the kind of thing that had a way of stamping itself on the mind.

Isol had returned only yesterday from a journey of over thirty years’ duration. According to the official story she had followed a single, accurate trajectory out of the Sol system towards its near neighbour, Barnard’s Star. All had been well. There were some nice photographs of nebulae, some pertinent observations on planets, black holes, the galactic hub and other such matters of importance to science. There were also many transmissions to and from the Forged Independence Party Headquarters.

Riba re-read these and their latest updates with the feeling that at last here was something he could get his teeth into. Isol was a political agitator and a radical of the out-there order. She wrote vehemently about the obsolescence of Old Monkey — the humans like Riba who were as nature had made them. It was Isol’s view that the Forged should create an independent state beyond the legislative and economic grip of the present Solar Government so that they could pursue their own reproduction and evolution unhindered by “historical and unsympathetic” views of their destiny.

Riba viewed the looming prospect of a civil war with mixed feelings. For the last few years the Forged Independence movement had grown. Together with an increasing lawlessness out in the wider system it had built an ominous momentum with incident after incident of piracy and assault out on the frontiers of Solar space. The Unevolved fear of their stronger and faster gengineered cousins had grown and on Earth there were daily incidents of violence and misunderstanding between the two. The Forged resented their slavery. The Unevolved envied the Forged their power. But the Forged supplied the Unevolved settlements with essential resources from the wider system, and the Unevolved . . . well, sometimes it was difficult to see exactly how the Unevolved fit into the macroeconomics of it all, but you could safely say they still had the dollars to buy in. They were a big market and the Forged had a lot to sell.

That was the big story as it was being broadcast, but Riba was more interested in what the little newsnets and the independents had to say. Their reporters had rounded on the fact that, for anyone with an Abacand and a half decent recollection of secondary education, you could see that it was clearly impossible to return to Earth within three years when you’d been travelling away from it as fast as possible for thirty. Besides, General Machen, the commander-in-chief of all Solar military and police forces, had issued a statement that morning in Riba’s very paper, warning against action until a thorough and full account of Isol’s journey could be published. And that level of explanation meant there was something very bad going on.

By the time Riba took his seat upon the
Byzantium’s
viewing deck and observed the tedious rituals of Buck’s Fizz before cast-off and salutes to the captain, he was already planning an in-depth exposé. He would write carefully of what facts he might find and he would argue with meticulous daring for the case of allowing the Forged complete freedom to self-govern — an angle his editor and the paper’s owner were also not averse to because they hoped it would mean that most of the Forged would disappear from Earth.

They were an hour into their flight and had just begun the low-altitude portion of the journey to allow a spot of whale-watching when Riba decided to take himself on a tour of the ship. But after a few minutes he was sure that he was being followed. He thought it might be his contact. He took a few turns that led him into the relative privacy of the luxurious upper deck accommodation corridor and waited. Thirty seconds later a man approached him and Riba’s neck hair stood on end for a second time that day. Not a woman in a green coat holding a leather bag but a man with long blond hair bound back into a queue and dark glasses, his powerful form almost entirely covered by a grey trenchcoat with its collar turned up high.

“Regrettably your investigation must end for the time being,” this young man said without preamble. He took Riba’s hand and arm in the semblance of a casual conversational hold though it effectively prisoned Riba in a vicelike grip. “I have been sent to send you to your contact.” He began to tow Riba along the corridor at a swift pace.

Riba struggled, at first without trying to appear in trouble, but then more violently. He didn’t like changes and he really didn’t care for the strength that so easily overpowered his own.

“Don’t make this difficult,” the man warned him in a low tone and Riba realized that he wasn’t the only one who was nervous.

“You are interfering with the lawful free press!” Riba asserted loudly in the textbook style. He was ignored in the same vein and found himself hauled along the ramp towards the aft gliding decks where wind-hangers and the elegant lines of individual air-yachts were moored by rope to the smooth flanks of the
Byzantium.

“Yes, yes,” said the agent. “That’s my job.”

“Help! This man is robbing me!” Riba shouted, but the
Byzantium’s
crew were busy at distant posts and the few passengers who were within earshot were of the kind who sank deeper in their seats or hurried away, afraid and embarrassed. Within moments both he and his captor were standing on the air deck, nothing in front of them except ten metres of beautifully finished hardwood landing strip and the blustery air over the ocean.

Riba scrabbled with his free hand in his pocket and signalled out with his Abacand, cuing emergency messages he’d had in place for just this awful moment. To his dismay a flat beep informed him that they were all blocked.

“It’s nothing personal,” said the agent, dragging him towards the edge of the launch pad. “And nothing permanent,” he added as he anchored his own feet with miraculous traction and pushed Riba over the side. Riba thought he saw bare feet not boots in that instant, and that the soles of the feet were covered in suckers.

This impression was wiped from his mind by complete terror as Riba understood that he was falling more than a hundred metres towards the unbroken waters of the Atlantic. He heard screaming and felt a searing pain in his throat as the gigantic hull of the
Byzantium
passed over him. His limbs flailed. He thought of helpless mice he’d held by the tail at pet shows, of Slattery’s high-pitched hamster saying
I bet you didn’t ask the mice . . .

Riba turned gently in the airstream and saw the sea rushing to meet him. As he marked the likely spot of his demise he saw something that almost made his heart stop prematurely.

Something was rising up through the water.

A great beast, pale and vast, more massive even than the largest whale — he couldn’t make out its exact shape. There was a centre, solid and near-white, but then there were great reefs and rafts of less tangible matter, tentacles and sheets of flesh that ballooned and snaked about in the surface water. For miles they seemed to reach out, a billion arms . . . He thought he saw a single enormous eye staring up at him and at that instant tried hard to die.

He fell and beneath him the creature suddenly thrashed and convulsed, stirring up a mass of bubbles into a frothing whirlpool where the simple sea waves had been. There was then no more time for thought. Riba met the ocean — not the hard, unyielding density of solid water, but the soft foam of the creature’s ferocious wake.

He felt himself falling still. To his astonishment the water accepted him in a gentle way. It drew him down unharmed into the cold of itself. Thoughts of the creature instantly made him kick and thrash. Riba stared wildly about him, seeing only dim greyness and the leisurely upward race of a trillion bubbles, feeling the pressure of endless water in his ears and against his lungs, just like the man’s hand on his arm — hard and merciless. He was deafened to everything but the sound of his own panic.

Riba made the surface choking and coughing and saw the awful pale hulk of the creature again as the shield of bubbles dissipated around him. Huge arms and fingers of translucent jelly, pocked with pink-edged suckers the size of saucers, reached towards him through the water. He turned and began to swim, hopelessly, but the tentacles were everywhere, some breaking the surface and turning their tips towards him where he saw, with horror, the distinct shapes of primitive pigment patches — yet more eyes.