The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (37 page)

After the creative
energy needed to produce
20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea, Verne rested on his mental laurels for a while. He was no
less productive. He completed his sequel to
From
the Earth to the Moon
with
Around the Moon
(1869), plus a short novel
inspired by his voyage on the
Great Eastern, Une ville
flottante (A Floating City)
(1870). His next long novel was
the uninspiring
Aventures de trois Russes et de trois
Anglais dans L’Afrique australe
(1871/2) — a work almost
as tedious as its title. It is sometimes known as
Measuring
a Meridian,
because that’s what the six men are trying
laboriously to do. He also began work on a long novel set in the polar regions
of northern Canada,
Le Pays des fourrures
(1872/3),
The Fur Country.

In the midst of all
this, Verne’s father died and it was almost as if Verne needed some light
relief He wrote a short humorous story, “Une Fantaisie due Docteur Ox” (1872),
usually translated as “Dr Ox’s Experiment”. Quiquendone is a small sleepy town
where nothing happens and the town council do their best not to rock the boat.
Under the pretext of installing street lighting, Dr Ox intends to give the town
a jolt in the arm by feeding them pure oxygen and then sit back and enjoy the
consequences. The story, all too often dismissed as minor, was a satire on the
dull
and complacent, those who would hold back the advance of science.
Once in a while Verne believed they should be taught a lesson. In the
following, Keith Brooke takes a leaf from Verne’s book.

How it is pointless to seek, even on the
best maps,
for the small development of Sunny Meadows

Sunny Meadows? Huh! Don’t
give me that Sunny Meadows crap. It’s a dump. Don’t waste your time looking for
it: it really isn’t worth it. You could call up a map on your Visionscreen and
eyeball it for Sunny Meadows but you’re wasting the effort. It’s just
urban-suburban sprawl. Get a satellite view and it’s all the same: Sunny
Meadows has nothing to distinguish it from anywhere else. It just is, although
nobody really cares whether it is or it isn’t. GPS would find it: this one, and
all the other Sunny Meadows in existence — look it up on Routemaster and you’ll
find something like eight entries, in the Thames Gateway, the M4 corridor,
Coventry, Hemel Hempstead . . .

If you don’t believe me,
just go there (nobody goes there, it isn’t worth it). Get in your car and drive
to good old Sunny Meadows. You probably won’t realize when you get there,
because Sunny Meadows looks much like its neighbouring suburbs, all
drive-through fast food churn-outs and identikit houses set back from the
roads. You can park in the Wal-Mart car park. Nobody will mind. Nobody much
goes there any more, since NutriMent UK came to Sunny Meadows and started
piping orders right into the home so you never even need to get off your fat
backside if you don’t want to.

Sunny Meadows wasn’t
always Sunny Meadows. In fact it wasn’t Sunny Meadows until fairly recently,
but urban sprawl has a habit of sprawling, bringing places like this into
existence. Before it was Sunny Meadows it was what they called a “grey field
development zone”: shells of old factories and warehouses, acres of dead tarmac
and concrete, a few scraggy patches of bramble and nettle growing where the
polluted soil permitted. But now it is transformed: this is a modern place to
live and, on the whole, the people are contented here.

Much of modern life
here, as elsewhere, is automated: the dreams of early sci-fi made flesh, or
rather, plastic and metal. No need to go out, for everything you need comes to
you who wait; those still carrying the mixed blessing of working for a living
usually do so from home, while the majority live off inherited investments in
automated factories and virtual trading cooperatives and other abstruse
financial constructs. Such an economy is precarious, built as it is from many
layers of carefully-stacked cards, but as yet no-one has found the right card
to pull so that — kerplunk! — down it all falls.

So what to do in this
world of inherited leisure? Some might choose to study the arts, or refine
their skills of contemplation, dwelling on those philosophical puzzles which
still beggar our understanding. Others might devote themselves to physical
improvement or to travelling to see the many wonders of the modern world (for
not everywhere is as unappealing as Sunny Meadows).

Most, however, watch the
vee.

They sit on sofas, with
a NutriMent outlet to hand, three, four or even five metre Visionscreens in
front of them. They sit and they watch. The
Bud and Suze
channel is a
popular one: 24/7 you can watch the ever-controversial couple, joking and
laughing in their any-place-anywhere apartment, the two of them watching the
vee and bitching with their friends in buddy windows. You can bitch to your own
friends in buddy windows, while you watch Bud and Suze doing exactly the same
thing on the vee. Everything’s voice-activated, so you just have to bellow for
Trish or Asif or Jeremy and if they’re on-vee you’ll pop up for each other in
buddy windows and bitch. You can yell at Bud and Suze, too, along with forty
million other yellers, and your input will be calibrated and entered into the
script machines guiding the daily lives of your two idols.

It’s not all
Bud and
Suze,
of course — they may be there 24/7 but you can hardly be with them
for all of that; you have to spread yourself around. You can flick the vee to
another channel with whatever voice-prompt you’ve pre-set.
Flick,
and
you’re on one of the games shows: On which family quiz did
Street Throb
winner
Davey Bruce win three days in a row before getting his last question wrong and
losing everything?
Flick,
you’re on one of the wet channels, anatomy
blown up and in your face on the four-metre, so much it takes a few seconds to
work out which bit you’re looking at.
Flick, animals,
all fur and teeth;
must be from somewhere far, far away.

Sunny Meadows? Come on .
. . why come to Sunny Meadows when you can live this life anywhere you choose?
So nobody ever comes to Sunny Meadows.

Apart from Dr Bull, of
course, and his bright young assistant Gideon Eden. They came to Sunny. Meadows
a couple of months ago, but nobody really noticed, at first.

In which Maddy and Nicholas consult about
the affairs of the town, and Maddy adjusts
her position
ever
so slightly

Maddy Wheatfen sat on
her sofa, legs tucked up underneath her. It wasn’t as well-placed as the
armchair, but the armchair was just a little too snug a fit these days. She’d
been telling herself for weeks that she’d have to rearrange things in here:
move the furniture around so she’d have the perfect view from the sofa; or, at
the very least, tilt the vee more in this direction. She would take care of it
one day. There was no hurry.

“Screw him!” she yelled
at her three-metre screen. Then, realizing that her words were open to
misinterpretation, and conscientious as ever about her input into the script
machines, she corrected herself: “I mean tell him where to get off, Suze. He’s
a no good, cheap jerk.”

There. That would show him. She felt good
now. “Hey, Nicholas,” she called, and a buddy window popped up onscreen. Her
good friend, Nicholas van Pommel beamed out at her.

“Hey, Maddy,” he said.
He paused for a couple of minutes, as if weighing the import of his next words.
“Looking good,” he said, finally.

Maddy reached down for a
toffee-cream smoothy from the NutriMent outlet and took a long slurp, licking
the thick mixture from her lips afterwards. “Likewise,” she said.

Nicholas’s eyes didn’t
stare straight out of the buddy window, so Maddy knew he was watching something
on his vee. She took another slurp.

Nicholas was something
on the town Advisory Board. Maddy liked it that at least one of her vee buddies
was Somebody. He would even consult her when big issues came up. Things to be
dealt with. They usually agreed that matters could safely be deferred. Let them
blow over. If they were important, they’d come up again. She liked to think
that she and Nicholas were a good team: a town Somebody and his focus group of
one. She liked to bring him into her world, too. “I yelled at
Bud and Suze,”
she told him now.

They sat in shared,
distant silence.

“I told Suze that Bud
was a no good jerk.”

Nicholas nodded.

“You watching them?”

Now, he shook his head. “Just
a wet,” he said.

It was Maddy’s turn to
nod. “You yell at it yet?”

He shook his head.

She finished her smoothy
and asked for another one. Seconds later, the NutriMent outlet churned out her
order. She realized her leg was getting uncomfortable, tucked up under her as
it was. She was still getting used to her relocation to the sofa. She realized
that more space can be harder to cope with than too little, in some ways. She
would have to move. Not yet, though; give it a few minutes.

“That Bud’s a jerk,”
Nicholas said, eventually.

Maddy nodded. She couldn’t
agree with her friend more.

She studied him more
closely, his bushy moustache drooping down around his mouth, the folds of skin
under his eyes, those sad dog eyes. If Maddy’s mother hadn’t passed away three
years ago she’d be telling her she could do a lot worse. It was true: she could
do a lot worse.

“Yeah,” she said. “He’s
a jerk.”

They let another long
silence pass.

“They say the Queensbury
flyover is looking a bit shaky,” said Nicholas.

“The Board really should
do something about that,” advised Maddy.

Nicholas shifted,
scratching somewhere just beyond his buddy window. “Hmm,” he agreed. “It should
be a priority item, of course. Top of the list.”

“I do hope someone
raises it,” said Maddy, revelling in the cut and thrust of town governance. “It
might fall down one day.”

“Hmm,” said Nicholas. “We
have other matters to deal with, of course — the state of the fire service, for
a start. Buildings could burn to the ground before anything was done. But the
flyover should be a priority matter after that. Before it falls down, at any
rate. Let’s just hope it doesn’t catch fire . . .”

Maddy realized that her
leg had gone to sleep, which could hardly be excused when she was dealing with
such elevated matters as agreeing that something should be done eventually,
when all other matters had been dealt with. This was important business. But
now . .. she leaned to one side, and regretted it, for a needle of pain stabbed
her previously dead leg. She shifted again, and eased her leg out further along
the sofa so that it was not trapped under her. There. That was much better. She
would get used to this arrangement before long. Maybe all she would have to do
was tilt the vee a little.

In which Tracy butts in, uninvited, and
plays gooseberry to Maddy’s voluptuous melon

Tracy buddied on to
Maddy’s veescreen. She wasn’t really Maddy’s buddy, but when she had called
Nicholas he’d made it a threesome, as it would have been rude of him to talk to
her and leave Maddy dangling. So up on to her screen, just below Nicholas’s
buddy window, Tracy Wordsworth pinged into virtual presence.

Tracy was a good ten
years younger than Maddy’s mumblety-mumble years, and she came in at
comfortably less than a hundred kilos, which was just plain unfair in Maddy’s
reckoning. She had good teeth, and full lips, and long, black hair that curved
just enough to frame her face in a really pretty way. She was Nicholas van
Pommel’s personal assistant. Maddy smiled at her, hoping that neither she nor
Nicholas could detect the steady grinding of her teeth.

“Nicholas,” said Tracy,
in her girly voice. “You’ll never believe me when I tell you there’s been a
fight!”

Maddy saw Nicholas come
to attention, his eyes peering directly out of his buddy window, one eyebrow
raised all of a couple of millimetres. She had not seen him so alert since the
final of
Whose Breakfast?

“A fight, you say?”
Nobody ever fought in Sunny Meadows, other than the street kids, and they didn’t
really count because the mall mood sprinklers kept them subdued easily enough.

“Well . . . not so much
a fight,” said Tracy. “More an altercation. Nothing physical. But voices were
raised. In Dr Bull’s house. At the presentation.”

Ah, the presentation. Dr
Bull had bought out the local NutriMent UK franchise, and was proposing some
significant improvements to the home delivery system. This afternoon he had
been demonstrating the system to a few select guests at his home on the other
side of Sunny Meadows. Nicholas had been invited, of course, but he had deferred
a decision on whether to attend or not, and now, well, now it was too late,
which was just as well by the sound of things. An altercation . . . Such things
did not happen in Sunny Meadows, always such a peaceful place, where nothing
really happened at all.