The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (30 page)

On the second floor of Barnum & Van Amburgh’s Museum, the aisles between the glass display cases held fewer visitors now, for most of the museum’s patrons had gone into Barnum’s theatre to watch the tableaux. As Jules Verne staggered past the Feejee Mermaid and a portrait of the Earl of Southampton, he paused to rest beside a weird conveyance: exactly like a royal coach, but scarcely a metre high. A brass plate on its door explained that this vehicle was Tom Thumb’s Carriage, and two Shetland ponies in convincing effigy were hitched to its traces.

“Hel-lo, hsssir,”
spoke a voice that seemed inhuman.

Verne looked up, and beheld a face that was human in shape yet not
alive. “Hel-lo, hsssir,”
it repeated in English.

The hauntings again! Verne retreated, intending to turn and walk swiftly away when he caught another look at this interlocutor.

A man of metal stood before him on a pedestal. The counterfeit man was authentically human in his size and proportions. His limbs were gracefully jointed, although a long iron strut attached to his right leg indicated that he had difficulty standing upright.

The automaton was dressed as a footman of the French court, in breeches and livery and peruke. There were lace ruffles at his throat, half-concealing some mechanism that Verne could barely perceive. The footman’s hands and face were carved wood, painted to simulate human flesh, but the colour had faded . . . and on some of the fingers it had chipped off altogether. He was perhaps five foot seven — two inches shorter than Jules Verne — yet by virtue of the pedestal he towered over Verne easily.

The footman stood in profile. Now, suddenly, his head turned and faced directly towards Verne. His eyes blinked, with mechanical precision. His jaw creaked open.

“Hel-lo, hsssir,”
the automatic man repeated. His right arm lifted stiffly, its hand gesticulating.
“Hhhow are you?”
His eyelids blinked, revealing pale blue eyes of Essen glass.

Hearing laughter, Verne approached. At the base of the footman’s pedestal stood a device resembling a harpsichord, with three banks of keys and levers: the former with ivory fittings, the latter in stained wood. A man — reassuringly human, in a hideous yellow waistcoat — was manipulating these, while two girls and a plump older woman laughed and fanned themselves.

On a brass plate near the keyboard, Jules Verne noticed a familiar name engraved:
JEAN EUGENE ROBERT
^,
HOUDIN.
The great magician! Verne had met him, and attended his performances in Montmartre. The inscription on this plate disclosed that the mechanical footman was Robert-Houdin’s patented Speaking Automaton. A bellows apparatus sent compressed air through the body of the Automaton, enabling him to speak as if equipped with human lungs. By pressing the manifolds of the keyboard, an operator could induce the Automaton to replicate human speech.

The waistcoated man and his companions had departed. Now the jaw of the Automaton dangled slackly and silent. Eager to reassure himself that the machine’s voice was a man-made contrivance, and not some unaccountable haunting, Verne approached the keyboard. He ran his finger across several keys, in the manner of a glissando.

“Mnerghajib!”
cried the Automaton.

Verne chose a key at random, and depressed this.

The Automaton emitted a loud consonant of uncertain parentage.

There was a stool before the keyboard. Seating himself, Verne now observed that each of the console’s keys and levers was incised with a letter or phonetic symbol. Vowels were on the lowermost bank of keys, nearest to hand, and the letter “E” centremost. Robert-Houdin had contrived his keyboard so that most accessible keys produced the letters uttered most frequently in French. Splaying his fingers, Jules Verne located the keys that would approximate the letters of his name. He touched the keys, interposing the sequence “JULES VERNE”.

“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.”