The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (45 page)

“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 . . .”

HECTOR SERVADAC,
FILS
by Adam Roberts

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.

1

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.”

2

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.

He bought a map at the gas station and spread it on the passenger seat. He’d parked in the sun, and the material of the seats was hot as if it had just that minute been ironed.

3

The two-hour drive took Hector four and a quarter hours, but finally he rolled up to the gates of his Dad’s new place. Hector senior had thrown a fence around the whole area, but most of the land was in a dip or depression in the land so pulling up at the gate afforded a fine view of the ranch. There were half a dozen buildings, including several tall barns. Several heavy machines were visible, diggers, tractors. Huge spools of cable lay piled in the shade of one of the barns. Round-shouldered apricot-coloured hills dominated the horizon.

Hector pulled out his mobile and called his Dad’s land-line. After a dozen rings his Dad picked up.

“Dad? I’m here. I’m at the gate.”

“Yeah,” replied his father. He always, or so it seemed to Hector, began his sentences with this drawly, emphatic assertion of positivity. More than a tic it had become a self-caricaturing habit. “Why didn’t you use the intercom?”

“I’m using my mobile.”

“Yeah. Well, the gate’s open.”

And so it was. Hector got back in the car and nudged the gate open with the fender; and, not bothering to stop, get out, shut it again, he drove straight down the side of the little hill into the declivity where the ranch house was. Pulling up to park alongside a grey four-by-four, itself parked beside a truck, he could see his father standing on the porch with two other people.