The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (34 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.

1  Sunny Meadows?

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.

2  Maddy and Nicholas consult

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.

3  Tracy butts in

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.

“It was Mr Green and that Mr Darley. They were getting very hot under the collar. It was after the sampling. They just started disagreeing with each other. It was most unseemly.”

Maddy knew from what Nicholas had told her of Town Board affairs that such behaviour was quite out of character for the two misters. She wondered what could possibly be behind it.

“Thank you, Tracy. I think that will be all for now.” Nicholas’s eyes had wandered back to the main panel of his veescreen, but he was clearly perturbed by these happenings. “My associate and I were dealing with pressing matters.”

So, she was his associate, was she? That must be good. Tracy’s buddy window popped away.

Pressing matters . . .

“That Bud’s a jerk,” said Maddy.

After a long pause, Nicholas nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. “He certainly is.”

4  Who, then, was Dr Bull?

In which Maddy and Nicholas pay a visit to
Dr Bull and it emerges that the good doctor
may not be all that he seems

Who, then, was this man who went by the name of Dr Bull?