by Mike Ashley
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 time-worn. 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 fict
ional characters arrayed before him in an infinite range of tableaux.
THE SECRET OF THE NAUTILUS
Michael Mallory
Even before he went to New York, Verne was thinking about his next book, which had the working title Un Voyage sous les Eaux, 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.
November 23, 1894
As I take up my pen to record these events of the past, I consider how many times I have previously sat down to do so, only to reconsider and crumple up the first page without bothering to go on to the second. Perhaps this account will be dismissed as fiction; perhaps it will go unnoticed altogether. I have no control over any of those eventualities; I am but the teller of the tale. As to whom I am, it is of little consequence. Were I to release my name, the reader might indeed recognize it, but that knowledge will add to neither the truthfulness nor the strangeness of the story. I am not the hero of this particular tale; rather, it is a man of remarkable abilities and intellectual capacity, a man known to the world as Captain Nemo.
How I came to be in the service of Captain Nemo is as immaterial to this history as my identity. Suffice it to say that I became a crewman in his submersible vehicle, the Argonaut, in the year 1876, during my twenty-sixth summer. Those familiar with two popular literary works in which Captain Nemo appears may protest that his great sub-aquatic vessel was not called the Argonaut, but the Nautilus, and they would be right, at least in part. They may also feel that they know the history of this amazing personage, but as I discovered during my time with the captain, the written record as it has existed up until now constitutes a deliberate fabrication. Until now, the truth about Captain Nemo has never been set down.
The most remarkable adventure of my life began in late August of that year, when Captain Nemo and I had consigned First Mate Willett to his Maker at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Willett and I represented the sole crew of the Argonaut, which was a much smaller vessel than the Nautilus, and his untimely demise – not, ironically, the result of one of the sea’s inherent dangers, but rather a burst appendix – cast a pall over the ship, so much so that when Captain Nemo appeared before me several days later with expression graver than any I had yet encountered, I initially assumed it was a late reaction to the tragedy. That, however, was not the case.
“Louis, we are changing course immediately,” he announced. “We will be heading for latitude 150° 30′ and longitude 34° 57′.”
“Where is that, sir?” I asked.
“The site of a former land mass in the South Pacific. I only pray I am not too late.”
“Too late for what, Captain?”
I could see a thunderhead forming on his face, and began to fear that my rampant curiosity, which occasionally served to annoy this man of indecipherable moods, was about to raise his ire. Within a moment, however, the storm passed.
“You might as well know,” he said, sombrely. “The time may come when I am in need of your assistance in this matter. Come with me while I reset our course.”
I followed him to the ship’s navigational room and, not for the first time, marveled at the directional system he had installed, which literally steered the submersible through the depths of the ocean in automated fashion, based on his calculations. While the system’s finer working points were known only to the captain, I knew that it operated on the same mechanical principle as a music box, with a slowly revolving cylinder that held movable and removable dots that, depending on their placement, controlled the instruments that governed depth, speed and direction. I waited until he was finished, at which time he astonished me by inviting me to join him in his private study, as though I were an equal on board the Argonaut! After offering me a cigar made from seaweed, which I declined, he lit one of his own, savoured the greenish smoke, and began. “As of this moment, Louis, we are in pursuit of a man named Ludovico Divenchy,” he said. “Have you heard that surname before?”
As he pronounced it – DEE-von-SHEE – I was not familiar with it, and said so.
“The name is a modern derivation of the original spelling, which might be more familiar to you: da Vinci.”
“You mean, as in Leonardo da Vinci?” I asked.
“I do, though you will not find the Divenchy branch of the family on any official records. The spelling and pronunciation was altered by the grandfather of Ludovico Divenchy, and subsequently retained by Ludovico’s father Beniamino and his brother Cesaré. They alone know of the family connection.”
“How, then did you learn of such things, Captain?”
“I should think that would be obvious, based on what I have told you.”
“You mean, you are . . . ?”
“I am Cesaré Divenchy,” he acknowledged, “and the man we are pursuing is my brother.”
I sat stunned at this revelation. “What has he done?”
“What I have prayed was not possible, even by my brother, whose knowledge of engineering surpasses my own, despite his youth,” he replied. “He has raised the Nautilus from its place of rest, that is what he has done. The signal sounded this morning.”
“Signal?” I uttered, now hopelessly lost.
“Before sinking the Nautilus, I installed on its dorsal fin a device that operates on the principles of electro-magnetic waves. The wave it emits is contained underwater, but in the open air it is programmed to sends a message to a receiver, which I keep here on board the Argonaut. Receipt of that signal means that the Nautilus has surfaced, and there are only two men in the world with the knowledge to facilitate it. Since I have not, it has to be Ludovico. Believe me, Louis, it is in the best interest of mankind to keep the Nautilus hidden at the bottom of the ocean.”
“But why?”
“Because of what it contains. Buried within the Nautilus is the body of my father, Beniamino Divenchy. Not only does he rest there, but his legacy is there as well – a legacy for which the world is not ready.”
“I do not understand, sir,” I said.
“How lucky you are, Louis,” Captain Nemo said ruefully, “for understanding my father and the consequences of his work has not offered me many peaceful days. Father was a scientist, and a brilliant one, but he did not so much leave footsteps as craters which were impossible to fill, at least by me. It was as though there were two men co-existing within his body: one of them benevolent and caring, and the other driven by his work to the point of inhumanity. Ludovico inherited Father’s driven side. He was brash and daring, never for one second doubting himself, even as a child. For that reason, Father favoured him at all times. I say this without bitterness, for I was quite content upon the day I could be free of th
em both. As a young man I traveled the world; I wed a beautiful Nepalese woman and had two wonderful children; I had little to do with my father and brother, until the association was forced upon me.”
“Forced by whom?” I asked.
“By those who wanted my father’s discovery.” He rose and began to pace in agitated fashion. “You may see fit to call me mad, Louis, but what I am about to tell you is the truth. My father discovered a way to make gold. I do not mean earn gold, I mean make it, create it from a base element.”
“He found the Philosopher’s Stone?” I gasped.
The captain shook his head impatiently. “There is no such thing. The transmutation of iron into gold is a chemical reaction involving extreme heat and molecular bombardment.”
“What a boon to mankind that could be!” I enthused.
Captain Nemo smiled sardonically. “So it might seem. So father wished. Alas, there was a dangerous side to it. Through Ludovico’s indiscretion, word of my father’s discovery filtered out. Most refused to believe it; however a few dangerous and powerful men sought to verify the rumour, and did so. Once confirmed, these men never gave us a moment’s peace, they hounded us for father’s notes.” He sat back down and regarded me through sorrow-filled eyes. “I was the weak link in the chain of familial stubbornness because I had a family. I took my wife and children out of Italy, but no matter where we went, we were pursued by these evil men. Eventually we fled to India, a country we loved, but were soon discovered. These human monsters did not even try for me. Instead they went straight for my innocent family. They murdered my wife and babes in cold blood and over their precious bodies told me to go to my father and tell him that they would not be deterred in their campaign to gain the secret of transmutation.”
