The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (33 page)

“Djoo-lesss
Fffvvurr-nuhh,”
wheezed the Automaton. Verne tried the keys
again, a bit more gracefully. “J
u-lesss Vvernuh.”
The head of the Automaton moved stiffly: chin flexing, jaw
clicking. The mechanical face turned aside, the eyelids closed.

Verne nodded, impressed.
The machine had spoken his name .. . but in accordance with proper spelling,
not pronunciation. Which keys should he press to make the Automaton pronounce
his name correctly? He surveyed the keyboard.

“Jules Verne,”
said someone, close at hand.

The Automaton turned its
head to confront Jules Verne.

The thing’s eyelids
opened, and Verne shuddered as two
living
eyes regarded him, set deeply
in a face that seemed suddenly more human than it had been a moment past.

“I am honoured to meet
you at last, Monsieur Verne,”
said a voice within the
Automaton, yet Verne felt an unaccountable certainty that this voice originated
somewhere distant from this place.
“Pardon the imperfections of my French.
Where I come from — perhaps I should say
when
I come from — your
language is not widely spoken.”

“Who . . . no,
what
are
you?” quavered Jules Verne. He was alone in this dark corridor with the
apparition before him. In the Museum’s adjacent salon, Verne glimpsed a
shadowed group of human figures, but they stood motionless, utterly frozen.
Perhaps they were waxworks.

“I am as human as
yourself,”
said the voice within the Automaton.
“But
it would cost a vast expenditure of energy for me to travel from my own abode
to where you are now. You see, my address is in the future.”

Verne recoiled. “Liar!
Rogue! This is one of Barnum’s humbugs. Somewhere nearby, an actor is
ventriloquizing . . .” As he spoke, Verne looked round for concealed
speaking-tubes.

“No, Mister Verne. It
has long been my wish to contact you, and to assure you that your novels will
still be read many years futurewards of your own lifetime. In a future which,
to a large extent, you yourself have shaped, Mr Verne.”
The Automaton put wooden hand to metal waist, and bowed stiffly as
it spoke these words.

Jules Verne snorted in
contempt. “I believe none of this! Your address is the future? In what
arrondissement
of next week do you live? In which
quartier
of tomorrow? Show it to
me, then! Let me gaze upon this future.”

There was another click
within his mind, and suddenly Jules Verne was elsewhere. He found himself
transported to a place both familiar and alien. He was standing in the Champs
Élysées . . . but the world had gone mad. Cannon fire erupted, and the streets
were ablaze. French troops were bayoneting women and children! Prussian
squadrons trampled through the Jardin des Tuileries, laughing as the French
forces slaughtered civilians.
“Behold the future: scarcely four years hence,
Monsieur Verne,”
said the voice within the Automaton.
“This is Paris in
May, 1871. More than 110,000 citizens of France will be slaughtered in
la
Semaine Sanglante:
the Week of Blood.”

Another click, and now
Verne found himself walking up a simple path. The sun’s position showed the
hour to be about half-past five in the afternoon, and there was only the barest
sliver of a crescent moon overhead. Before him was a house he had never seen
before, and yet he somehow sensed that this unknown domicile was his own
residence. He was holding a latchkey in his right hand. His limbs felt heavy
with age, and Verne was astonished to find his face wreathed in a heavy greying
beard. At the end of the path, near the house’s front door, stood a man with
his back turned.

“March ninth, 1886,”
said the voice in the Automaton.
“This is — this will be — your
own house in the Rue Charles-Dubois, Monsieur
Verne.
You have spent the
afternoon at your club, and now a visitor awaits you.”

The man in front of
Verne turned round, with anger in his hazel-coloured eyes. For an instant,
Verne recognized his brother Paul. But this man was in his mid-twenties: he was
Paul Verne unaccountably youthened, just as Jules Verne had somehow become
unaccountably aged. And this younger edition of Verne’s brother wore only a
thin moustache, without Paul Verne’s accustomed spade beard and side-whiskers.
The young man saw the aged Jules Verne, and his eyes gleamed with the blaze of
insanity.

Wait a moment. The
Automaton had mentioned the year 1886. But in that distant future year, Paul
Verne would be nearly sixty. This young man, the image of Verne’s brother, must
be . . .

“Gaston?” asked Verne,
astonished. His voice felt timeworn. When Jules Verne and his brother Paul had
sailed for New York in 1867, Paul’s son Gaston had been only seven years old. “Gaston?
I am your uncle Jules. What is happening?”

Gaston Verne raised a
pistol, and aimed it squarely at his
uncle. Jules Verne heard
two shots ring out. At the second gunshot, his left leg exploded . . .

In agony, Verne
staggered back . . . and found himself once more in the corridor of Barnum’s
museum, in 1867. His face was beardless. His left shin, just above his ankle,
tingled unpleasantly but appeared unharmed.

“Is that enough future
for you?”
asked the Automaton.
“Now, sir, I will explain. In my century —
far ahead of here — the novels of Jules Verne are still read and admired. I
wish I could say as much for your plays. In my century, we have a limited
ability to look yesterwards, and to witness the past . . . even to send some
information backwards through time, although such things are strictly rationed.
To send
myself
into the past would have required far too much energy, so
I have contented myself with briefly occupying other vessels . . . such as this
impressive Automaton of your countryman Robert-Houdin.”

Jules Verne rubbed his
left leg angrily, and listened.

“The process of
witnessing the past is a difficult one,”
continued
the Automaton . . . or rather, the unseen visitor who spoke from within the
Automaton’s mechanism.
“I have one opportunity, and only one, in which to
see the great Jules Verne: only one occasion, in the span of your lifetime, in
which to witness your actions and audit your words. Naturally, Monsieur Verne,
I chose to observe you in April 1867: during the one week in your life when you
visited New York and Canada. Specifically, I chose this particular night —
April ninth — so that I could get my money’s worth of marvels. This is the
night, sir, when you met Phineas Barnum, and when you visited his Museum filled
with miracles and humbugs. The opportunity for me to observe Jules Verne
and
Phineas Barnum in a single yester-glance was too good to pass up.”

“Very well, monsieur,”
said Verne, regaining his composure. “You have seen me. What of it?”

“Simply this, sir. The
process of gazing backward from my century to your own is imperfect. I have
stirred up a few distortions in the time-stream, some chronal overtones. This
was unavoidable.”

Jules Verne rubbed his
left shin, unable to relinquish the
sensation that he had
actually been shot. “So, then. Those things I saw and heard? The bridge to
Brooklyn that has not yet been built? The hippodrome that no longer stands?”

“My
fault, I confess,”
said the visitor within the
Automaton. “In
attempting to reach across the centuries for a glimpse of
1876, I have muddied the currents of the time-stream . . . and inadvertently
given you a few glimpses — let us call them tableaux vivants — of the adjacent
past and
future.”

The pain in Jules Verne’s
leg was no longer there, as if the injury had never occurred. Perhaps it never
had, and never would. Now he stood defiantly, confronting the Automaton. “You
claim to be the future? My future?” Verne snapped his fingers, as if dismissing
a waiter. “I reject you, whatever you call yourself. I am Jules Verne! I
create
the future, and you are not part of it! Those things you showed me: Paris
in flames? My own nephew a homicidal madman?
Non, monsieur.
One week
from tonight, when my brother Paul and I set sail for Brest, I will set down my
account of this New York adventure . . . and I will take care to leave you out
of it altogether. You have now been unhappened, sir!”

As Verne spoke these
words, he touched the keyboard of the Automaton, pressing several keys without
knowing their functions. The mechanical footman’s arms gesticulated, as if
warding off an attack. The footman’s eyelids clacked shut, and his mechanical
mouth emitted one last gust of speech:

“Au revoir.”

There was movement in a
nearby corridor. The night’s tableaux had ended, and now the audience were
departing Barnum’s theatre. Jules Verne stood between the waxworks, and he
pondered what he had seen tonight. These phantom yesterdays and threatened
tomorrows: Paris besieged, Gaston Verne a madman. Were these things real, or
merely part of Barnum’s humbugs?

At least one portion of
tonight’s entertainments had been honest enough to confess its fakery. Verne
recalled that the tableau on Barnum’s stage — the burning house — had been indeed
quite convincing. The steam-driven fire-engine had been genuine, but it had
employed counterfeit water to extinguish artificial fire.

“Perhaps the pasts and
the futures which I witnessed tonight are merely . . .
tableaux vivants,”
Jules
Verne decided. “Performances contrived for my benefit, to entertain me. In that
event, they have succeeded.” He shuddered once more, at the memory of
witnessing Paris in flames. “But I choose not to look behind this particular
curtain, to see the stage machinery that has trundled these tableaux into
place.”

Now the theatre doors
were opened wide by the ushers in gilded brocade, and Paul Verne came forth
with Barnum at his arm. With a deep bow, Phineas Barnum invited Jules Verne and
his brother to come backstage and view the scenery-changing apparatus.

“Thank you, but . . .
no,” said Verne sadly, stepping away from the pedestal of Robert-Houdin’s
talking Automaton, and slightly surprised to find himself walking with a faint
limp in his left leg. “The illusions, Mister Barnum, are more enchanting if one
does not see the wheels turning behind the scenes. I have a long voyage ahead,
in unexpected and uncharted regions.” Verne nodded graciously. “But I shall
never forget the tableaux that have been shown to me tonight. I do not think
that I will pass this way again.”

Taking his brother’s
arm, Jules Verne moved towards the egress of Barnum & Van Amburgh’s Museum,
and the night air beyond. Already, in his mind, Jules Verne was imagining a
wondrous new procession of tomorrows . . . and fictional characters arrayed
before him in an infinite range of tableaux.

Even before he went to
New York, Verne was thinking about his next book, which had the working tide
Un Voyage sous les Éaux,
but it was not until he returned that
he had the time to develop it. The result would arguably be his best book,
probably his best known, and certainly with his most famous character: Captain
Nemo in
Vingt Mille Lieues sous les Mers — 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea
(1869/70). Verne had  to revise his original draft because Nemo had become too
strong a character, too full of revenge, aimed solely at the Russian Empire,
because of their treatment of the Polish. Hetzel persuaded Verne to tone down
this hatred and make Nemo more of a Robin Hood character who fought against all
oppressors. Hetzel was probably right because Verne made Nemo far more
enigmatic, a mystery man whose origins and motives are not entirely known or
understood. This gave him a fascination that has intrigued readers ever since.
Even Verne could not leave him alone as he brought him back in a sequel,
L’île
mystérieuse,
in 1874.

Perhaps equalling Nemo
for fascination in the story is his creation, the submarine
Nautilus.
There was nothing new in describing a submarine —
they had existed for many years and the inventor Robert Fulton had even named
his
Nautilus
in 1797. But none were like Verne’s
remarkable
machine,
powered
by electricity, and with every comfort,
able to tour the entire underwater domain. A vengeful enigmatic commander with
his all powerful invention was a successful formula that not only Verne would
exploit again, but which has become a staple figure in science fiction and
techno-thrillers ever since. We will encounter both Nemo and the
Nautilus
again in this anthology.