Captain Nemo

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Each day he scanned the news for events of the world, new discoveries and reports of far-flung lands—places he and Nemo had dreamed about in their youth. Most of all, he tried to be satisfied with the life he had accepted and never to think of Caroline Aronnax again. . . .

  One morning, a bizarre article in a Paris weekly caught Verne’s attention. German explorers in a caravan marching south into the Sudan from Tripoli had discovered a strange wrecked vessel in the sand dunes of the Sahara. The iron-walled capsule, shaped like a gigantic artillery shell, had been embedded in a crater in the rolling ocean of desert. The projectile seemed to have fallen out of the sky and crashed.

  While the uneasy nomads hung back on their camels, the German explorers had pried open the wreckage. Inside, they found the remains of several men squashed to jelly, bones pulverized by an explosive acceleration of inconceivable magnitude. Desiccated supplies, dead chickens and goats lay in a mashed clutter. But the explorers could find no explanation of how these poor wretches had gotten here, what they had been up to, or why they had undertaken such a terrible risk.

  Puzzled, Verne used his heavy scissors to snip out the article. Such mysteries tantalized him. Even without additional information, Verne could perhaps invent a tale to explain such a fantastic occurrence, but he could think of no circumstance outrageous enough to fit the facts.

  He added the clipping to his growing pile of notes and ideas, wondering when he would ever have the freedom or enthusiasm to pursue all the stories that floated in his head. Perhaps he needed a “fiction factory” of his own, like Dumas . . . but for that, he would have to begin making money at it, and that seemed a long way off.

  Honorine knocked on the door and quietly reminded him of the time. With a heavy sigh, Verne finished his cold tea and stood to get dressed. Once again, he had written nothing all morning, had made no progress toward creating a famous work of literature.

  Instead, he spent the rest of his day at the dreary stock exchange, making and losing other people’s money.

  II

  Over time, Nemo came to love Auda, his assigned wife in Rurapente. She was a beautiful Turkish maiden with silky black hair and creamy tan skin, her sepia eyes large and catlike, her mouth full, her body lean and supple. Auda would have become part of the sultan’s harem in Ankara, if Caliph Robur had not given her to Engineer Nemo as a reward. . . .

  For more than two years now, Nemo had managed the caliph’s ambitious project to create an armored sub-marine boat. He had been given comfortable accommodations, good food, and various amenities, all of which were intended to make him forget his situation—and he had demanded the same for every one of the captive men.

  But even his beautiful wife and luxurious dwelling could not disguise the fact that he remained the Caliph’s prisoner, forced to work against his will on a terrible weapon of war. Every time he saw the dusky, exotic features of Auda, he could think only of Caroline, their stolen moments of love aboard the ship home from Africa, and in her own bedchambers on his last night before departing Paris by train to the Crimean front.

  Every day, he saw Auda’s caring in her deep-brown eyes, and he felt sorry for her situation as well as his. His own guilt and longing for Caroline had made him avoid this unwanted young woman for many weeks, but Auda was patient, and loving. The only bright flower in this miserable place. Caliph Robur would never let them leave Rurapente.

  With his European comrades, Nemo had developed a plan for the submarine boat. In a written list to Robur, he proposed a long series of tests to determine the best method for building an underwater war vessel. Together, the men set to work, clinging to their only hope of freedom.

  The boatbuilder Cyrus Harding assisted with the overall concepts of a water-tight submerged boat based on what Nemo remembered of Robert Fulton’s design. The metallurgist Liedenbrock experimented with alloys to create a strong but light material for plating the hull of the vessel. Conseil strove to develop ways to contain atmospheres inside the craft, compressing air and mixing blends of oxygen and nitrogen to produce the best breathing gas for underwater explorers.

  Other engineers expanded upon Nemo’s childhood idea of enclosing one’s head in a breathing sphere so as to allow a man to walk beneath the sea. Glassmakers, hydraulic engineers, and mechanics all pitched in, resigned to their fates as the years passed.

  The facilities and resources of Rurapente gave them everything they requested, any necessary supplies or materials. Throughout the work, Caliph Robur scrutinized their progress, riding about on his dark stallion and keeping a watch on the smoke belching from the smelters and glass blowers’ huts. He demanded regular reports, and Nemo had long ago given up any pretense of concocting exaggerations. He let the intense man see for himself how much progress his captive experts were making.

  After six months of satisfactory work, Robur had brought in a group of women and assigned them as wives to the European engineers. He seemed intent on making his pet scientists settle down and forget their former lives.

  Under the caliph’s watchful eye, Nemo knew they might remain trapped here in this hidden city for years. Though he pretended to cooperate, at night Nemo seethed over his stolen life, and his lost Caroline. . . .

  The lovely Auda was one of twenty daughters sired by another caliph, Barbicane, a conservative rival of Robur’s. The jewel of the group of assigned wives, Auda was quiet and intelligent, a prisoner of fate as much as Nemo was. Though he still thought of Caroline, despairing that he had broken his promise to return to her, he also knew that Auda would be punished and ridiculed if he refused her. And she did not deserve that.

  He treated his wife well, and she proved to be a warm companion for him. When Nemo came in after a day’s hard work, Auda would rub his shoulders, bathe his feet, and wipe cool perfumed cloths over his forehead and neck. She spoke a little English, much to Nemo’s surprise, and over the following year and a half she taught him to be fluent in Turkish, while he reciprocated by teaching her French.

  Late at night, while he stared at his blueprints and calculations by lamplight, Auda often sat by his side and studied the drawings herself. Not until she began to make insightful and relevant suggestions did he realize that she understood the intricacies of his diagrams. Though he had accepted her as his wife, he’d never imagined Auda might be as educated or clever as his beloved Caroline.

  “I studied in Ankara, my husband,” Auda answered. “I learned mathematics, astronomy, alchemy, and even some surgery. The eunuch in my father’s house was fond of me and shared his books. But my father, Caliph Barbicane, abhors science—especially if it is taught to women. When he discovered what the eunuch had done, he executed the man and banished me here to Rurapente. He considered it a great punishment to place me in the clutches of Caliph Robur.”

  When she smiled at Nemo, her sepia eyes glittered like mysteries in the yellow lamplight. “But it is no punishment after all. I find each day with you to be a reward, my husband. You treat me as a friend and teach me even more. How could I have hoped for so much?”

  After that evening, Nemo made a point of discussing the sub-marine development with her, though she warned him not to mention their conversations to the other engineers—and most particularly not to Robur.

  Auda explained how, in the politics of the Ottoman Empire, the great sultan was pulled in various directions by his military advisors, the caliphs, who often held secret and enormous power. Some caliphs, like Robur, wanted Turkey to become a modern nation, comparable to the European states, while others—conservatives such as her father—wanted to return to rigid Islamic principles and blindfold their people to changing times.

  Now Nemo understood why Robur so often disappeared from the isolated industrial compound to ride inland for days. He was running back to Ankara to sit in the Sultan’s palace and advocate his new weapons and technology.

  When Robur returned from his sojourns in a foul mood, he roared at Nemo for not making sufficient progress. “Your men must complete
the sub-marine boat in time to show the sultan its wondrous power. My own fate depends upon it—and yours as well.”

  Nemo and his men developed a metal-walled chamber to be submerged in the deep cove of Rurapente. It was not meant to move, simply to test the hull metals and the water-tightness of the seals. The first unmanned test chamber broke apart in the deepest water, its window panes shattered.

  The caliph wanted to behead the glassmaker whose work had failed, but Nemo stood up for the man, placing himself in mortal danger. Robur grudgingly backed down in his rage, and all the captives looked relieved.

  After the second experimental tank retained its integrity, Caliph Robur insisted that a “volunteer” slave be placed inside for the third test, as a demonstration of human endurance. The chamber sank to the greatest depths of the channel and remained intact. Unfortunately, it took Nemo and his engineers several hours to raise the vessel again . . . by which time the poor man inside had suffocated. Conseil, who had designed the air-storage systems, shuddered with guilt over the man’s death.

  Though Nemo and his team learned a great deal from each experiment, Robur considered the failures to be dire setbacks. The stern caliph punished the men by reducing their rations, and Nemo had to argue furiously with the stubborn warlord to have their full privileges reinstated. For days afterward he fumed, once again trying to determine how they could all escape from Rurapente—and once again he came up with no answers. Auda comforted him, and told him to be patient. . . .

  Two years after they were married—five years after he had left France for the Crimea—beautiful Auda bore him an infant boy who became the bright light in Nemo’s life. After the birth, her face drawn with the effort and her silky hair streaked with sweat, Nemo found his wife more beautiful than ever. In that moment he realized that he had indeed come to love Auda.

  Looking back over everything he had lost, Nemo took comfort in this one thing: at least he had gained her. As he remembered his childhood and the happy days in Nantes, he held the baby son in his arms and smiled.

  “We will name him Jules,” he said.

  III

  Long after the Treaty of Paris ended the Crimean War, soldiers continued to trickle home from the Black Sea battlefields. They were a sorry sight, wounded in mind and body, completely without the songs or hurrahs they had carried in their hearts when they’d gone off to war.

  But André Nemo was not among them. Month after month, he did not come home, nor did he send any word. He had vanished somewhere in the war.

  Preoccupied with his new family, his struggles as a writer, and his daily work in the stock market, Jules Verne spared only an occasional thought for his old friend. He and Honorine, with her two daughters, traveled to Nantes for a spring holiday, where Verne ate well of his mother’s cooking. In Paris, their personal finances had been tight, as always.

  During the visit home, he held the usual brief conversations with his father while reading the newspapers and reviewing the events of the day. The “Iron Tsar,” Nicholas I, had died the year before, leaving the country in the hands of his more open-minded son Alexander. Autocratic Russia had grudgingly resigned her protectorate over the Orthodox Church in Turkey, and the great Sultan of the Ottoman Empire promised privileges for his Christian subjects. The Black Sea became a neutral body of water, and the world began to settle down.

  France’s Parliament engaged in heated discussions about the outrageous ineptitude of the military bureaucracy during the conflict. Others challenged Emperor Napoleon III’s clumsy foreign policy, which had unnecessarily drawn France into the war in the first place. In Britain, the outspoken reformer Florence Nightingale used official records and damning statistics to show that of the 100,000 fatalities in the Crimea, fully a quarter of them had died of disease, exposure, and lack of supplies rather than from battlefield injuries. Inexcusable.

  Tennyson’s scathing but heroic poem immortalized the Light Brigade’s senseless and futile charge against murderous odds. The victims—“Theirs not to question why, theirs but to do or die”—became symbols for the confusion and tragedy of the Crimean War. . . .

  Thus, by virtue of his brief vacation in Nantes, Verne was at his old house when the terrible message came from the French war department.

  When enlisting years earlier, Nemo had written down the names of Jules Verne and Caroline Hatteras as “next of kin.” The war department letter, identical to so many others, gave few details aside from the stark announcement that André Nemo had been killed at the battle of Balaclava.

  According to military records, he had been buried with other brave soldiers outside Sevastopol. He had left no personal effects.

  Standing in the doorway, Verne held the official communiqué with trembling hands. While arranging flowers in a vase in the back room, Honorine watched him blocking the sunlight, observed her husband’s reaction as he opened the note and read the words. She came forward, grasping the flowers in her hand, as she instinctively tried to comfort him. Instead, Verne walked in a daze away from his father’s old house to wander the streets of Ile Feydeau.

  Not surprisingly, he found himself on Caroline’s doorstep. Despite her new offices in Paris, she still lived much of the year in Nantes. Now he heard music inside, her delicate fingers on the keys of the pianoforte, no doubt playing one of her own secret compositions, a mournful and ethereal melody that sounded like a dirge. When she answered his insistent ringing of the bell, Verne saw from her drawn face, reddened eyes, and tear-streaked cheeks, that she too had received a letter.

  “He went to the Crimea because of me,” Caroline said. “He wanted to get away for a year. We should not have waited! I cared nothing for any public scandal.” She looked at him with her glittering blue eyes. “Ah, Jules, I pushed André from Paris, and he went off to the fighting so that he could forget about me until I was free.”

  Verne didn’t know what to say—but then, he had always been tonguetied around her. Just seeing the beautiful woman who had consumed his youthful, imaginative passions reminded Verne of all the things he had not achieved in his life. “No one could ever forget you, Caroline,” he said.

  Without a further word, she leaned forward to let Verne awkwardly gather her in his arms. He embraced her, thinking of all the times he had longed to do just this. But now grief made her touch cold and desperate.

  “I will survive somehow, Jules,” she said. “I cannot believe André is gone, when his memory lives so strongly in my heart. Could it be a mistake? We thought him dead before, and yet he returned. He promised me he would return.”

  “I . . .” Verne found himself at a complete loss for words, again. “I would not want to give you an unreasonable hope, Caroline. This letter leaves no doubt.” He held up the paper note he had wrinkled in his grasp.

  “We must remember André as the wonderful man he was, you and I. No one knew him better.” She brushed her fingers across Verne’s unruly reddish-brown hair, sending a shiver down his spine.

  His heart pounded, and his blood grew hot from reawakened longing. But now that she might finally give up waiting for her lost captain, and waiting for Nemo . . . Verne himself was married. They stood together for a long moment, until Caroline pulled away.

  “Yes, I’ll certainly remember him. He was closer to me than my own brother,” Verne said, and understood that he had to go. His wife was waiting for him back at home.

  IV

  Rurapente’s cove had become a massive construction site. Ramps and scaffolding extended into the deep water. The sounds of Robur’s slave workers hammering rivets echoed like gunfire off the close mountain walls.

  The slaves pounded hull plates, bent framework pipes, and twisted steel support ribs into proper shapes. Gritty smoke and chemical fumes from the refineries filled the air faster than ocean breezes could sweep the stench across the Mediterranean.

  Nemo stood on a platform deck, directing construction and supervising the captive engineers and indentured workers. Rather than just watching, though
, he spent most of his time up to his knees in water that sloshed into the drydocks. He tried to maintain the morale of the men, while searching for subtle ways to resist their despised captor.

  The skeleton of his sub-marine craft was taking shape. Despite being forced to this labor against his will, Nemo admired what he had accomplished and felt pride in his design. If only the innovative vessel had been for a different purpose, other than hated war . . .

  The bottom hull had been reinforced according to Cyrus Harding’s instructions. The British boatbuilder teamed up with the German-born metallurgist to inspect the progress. Riveted plates crawled up the walls, sealing the underwater vessel so that it floated like a dragon inside the construction dock. Muscular Turkish slaves used hand pumps to drain water from the bilges.

  Nemo’s son Jules was a year old now, a bright joy in an oppressive life. The boy had his mother’s black hair and full mouth, and his father’s determined, optimistic spirit. The child had no idea that his loving home was a prison camp. At times, the toddler’s laughing eyes even made Nemo forget for a while.

  The captive engineers had been away from their homelands for so long that they hardly remembered what a normal existence could be like. Few had left families behind, and after so many years their longing for Europe had deadened to a dull ache. Their lives were here, and now, and they had little hope for improvement. They worked on the undersea vessel and devoted their hearts to its completion—for their own pride, not for their captor’s.

  When Caliph Robur returned to Rurapente after a three-week sojourn with the great sultan, he rode his stallion down to the construction site. As he haughtily studied the incomplete vessel, his expression was not pleased. The warlord’s narrow face twisted, and his skin darkened with rage, highlighting the scar along his cheek. Nemo looked at him and guessed that Robur was losing his continuing political battles against the conservative caliphs in Ankara.