Frankenstein Unbound

by Aldiss, Brian

  “Why do you suppose that?”

  “Because that intense pleasure which procreation gives is the moment when human beings shed their humanity and become as the animals, mindless, sniffing, licking, grunting, copulating... My new creation was to be free of all that. No animal origins, no guilt...”

  With his hand, he covered his eyes and his brow.

  “You have a singularly repulsive view of humanity,” I said. “Is this perhaps why you will do nothing to save Justine?”

  “I cannot go to the syndics. I cannot!”

  “At least tell the woman whom you love. There must be trust between you!”

  “Tell Elizabeth? I would die of shame! I have not even confided in Henry, and he was a student with me at Ingoldstadt, when I began my experiments! No, what I have done myself, I must undo myself. Leave me now, whoever or whatever you are. I have said things to you, Bodenland, which I have said to no man; see that they repose in you as securely as in a grave. I am discomposed, or I would not speak as I have. I mean to arm myself from this day on—be warned, lest you are tempted to trespass on my confidence. Now, I pray, leave me.”

  “Very well. If you will confide in nobody else, then you know what you must do.”

  “Leave me, I asked you! You know nothing of my problems!—Wait, one commission you could do for me!”

  “Ask me!”

  He looked somewhat shame-faced. “For good reasons which you may or may not understand, I desire to remain here in the wilderness, away from those to whom I may inadvertently bring catastrophe. Take, I beg you, a word of explanation to Elizabeth Lavenza, my betrothed.”

  All his movements were impatient. Without waiting for my assent, he pulled writing materials from his cloak, where I saw he had several notebooks. He ripped a page from one of them. Turning, he leaned against a rock and scribbled a few sentences—with the air of a man signing his own death warrant, I thought.

  “There!” He folded it. “I can trust you to deliver it unread?”

  “Most certainly.” I hesitated, but he turned away. His mind was already elsewhere.

  VI

  * * *

  I went on foot to the house of the Frankensteins. It was an imposing mansion standing in one of Geneva’s central streets and overlooking the Rhone. When I asked to speak for a moment with Miss Lavenza, a manservant showed me into a living room and asked me to wait.

  To be there! Victor was right to wonder what I was. I no longer knew myself. My identity was becoming more and more tenuous. It would be the way of our century to say that I was suffering from time shock, no doubt; since our personality is largely built and buttressed by our environment and the assumptions environment and society force upon us, one has but to tip away that buttress and at once the personality is threatened with dissolution. Now that I actually stood in the house of Victor Frankenstein, I felt myself no more than a character in a fantastic film. It was not a displeasing sensation.

  The furniture was light and cheerful. I could hear voices somewhere as I looked around, studying the portraits, examining the marquetry of the chairs and tables, all of which were ranged formally about the walls. A peculiar light seemed shed over everything, by dint of it being that house and no other!

  I crossed to the window to look more closely at a portrait of Victor’s mother. Long casement windows were opened into a side garden laid with neat, symmetrical paths. I heard a woman’s voice somewhere above me say sharply, “Please do not mention the subject again!”

  I had no scruples about eavesdropping.

  A man’s voice replied, “Elizabeth, dearest Elizabeth, you must have thought of these things fully as much as I! I beg you, let us discuss them! Secrecy will be the undoing of the Frankensteins!”

  “Henry, I cannot let you say a word against Victor. Silence must be our policy! You are his dearest friend, and must act accordingly.”

  A tantalizing snatch of conversation!

  Peeping cautiously, I could see that there was a balcony overlooking the garden. It belonged to a room on the first floor, where possibly Elizabeth had her own sitting room. That it was she, and talking to Henry Clerval, I now had no doubt.

  He said, “I’ve told you how secretive Victor was in Ingoldstadt. At first, I thought he was mentally deranged. And then those months of what he chose to call nervous fever... He kept babbling then about some fiend that had taken possession of him. He seemed to get over it, but he behaved in the same alarming manner in court this morning. As an old friend—as more than friend—I beg you not to contemplate marriage with him—”

  “Henry, you must say no more or we shall quarrel! You know Victor and I are to be married. I admit Victor is evasive at times, but we have known each other since early childhood, we are as close as brother and sister—” She checked what she was saying and then went on in an altered tone. “Victor is a scientist. We must respect his moods of abstraction.” She was going on to add something more, when a cold voice behind me said, “What may you be after?”

  I turned. It was a bad moment.

  Ernest Frankenstein stood there. The anger on his brow made him look uncommonly like a younger version of his brother. He was dressed all in black.

  “I am being kept waiting with a message for Miss Lavenza.”

  “I see you put your waiting to good use. Who are you?”

  “My name, sir, since you inquire so civilly, is Bodenland. I come with word from Mr. Victor Frankenstein. He is your brother, is he not?”

  “Didn’t I see you in court this morning?”

  “Whom did you not see in court this morning?”

  “Give me the message. I will deliver it to my cousin.” I hesitated. “I would prefer to deliver it direct.”

  As he put out his hand, Elizabeth entered behind him. Perhaps she had heard our voices and used them as an excuse to break away from Henry Clerval.

  Her entry gave me the chance to ignore Ernest and present her with Victor’s note myself, which I did. As she read it, I was able to study her.

  She was small, delicately made, and yet not fragile. Her hair was the most beautiful thing about her. True, her face was perfect of feature, but I thought I saw a coldness there, a pinched look about the mouth, which a younger man might have missed.

  She read the note without changing her expression. “Thank you,” she said. I was dismissed in the phrase. She looked haughtily at me, waiting for me to leave. I gazed at her, thinking that if she had appeared gentler I might have ventured to say something to her on Victor’s behalf. As it was, I nodded and made for the door; she looked the sort of woman who won protracted lawsuits.

  I went back to the car.

  Whatever the time was, it was later than I wished. I still hoped to aid Justine—or rather to correct the course of justice, feeling, in some vague and entirely unwarrantable way, that I was more civilized than these Genevese, having a two-century evolutionary lead over them!

  My diversion with the Frankensteins had gained me nothing. Or perhaps it had. Understanding. I certainly understood more about the explosive nature of Frankenstein’s situation; hell hath no fury like a reformer who wishes to remake the world and finds the world prefers its irredeemable self. And his complex emotional relationship with Elizabeth, which I had but glimpsed, made the situation that much more precarious.

  These matters rolled round and round my brain, like a thunderstorm, like clothes in a tumble-dryer. As I drove along the edge of the lake eastwards, I was hardly conscious of the beautiful and placid scenery. A steady rain began to fall. Perhaps it prevented me from noting how rapidly the season seemed to have advanced. The trees were now heavy with dark-green foliage. The corn was already ripening and the vines were in full leaf, with bunches of grapes hanging thickly.

  My own world was forgotten. It had been displaced by my new personality, by what I believe I called earlier my superior self. The fact was that all sorts of strange gearshifts were taking place within my psyche, and I was eaten up by the morbid drama of Frankenstein.
Once more I tried to recall what was to happen, as recounted in Mary Shelley’s book, but what little returned was too vague to be of use.

  Certainly Frankenstein had gone away to study—to Ingoldstadt, I now knew—and there spent some years researching into the nature of life. Eventually he had built a new being from dismembered corpses, and had reanimated it. How he had overcome all the complex problems of graft rejection, septicemia, and so on—not to mention the central problem of bestowing life—was beyond me, although I took it that fortune had favored his researches. He had then been horrified by what he had done, and had turned against the creature to which he stood as God stood to Adam—that sounded like the baffled reformer again to me! In the end (or in the present future) the creature had overcome him. Or had he overcome it? Anyhow, something dreadful in the way of retribution had occurred, in the nature of things.

  In the nature of things? Why should something dreadful come of good intentions?

  It seemed an immensely important question, and not only when applied to Frankenstein. Frankenstein was no Faust, exchanging his immortal soul for power. Frankenstein wanted only knowledge—was, if you like, only doing a bit of research. He wanted to put the world to rights. He wanted a few answers to a few riddles.

  That made him more like Oedipus than Faust. Oedipus was the world’s first scientist. Then Frankenstein was the first R & D man. Oedipus had received a lot of dusty answers to his researches too.

  I broke off that silly line of thought and retraced my mental steps.

  Whatever previous generations made of it, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was regarded by the twenty-first century as the first novel of the Scientific Revolution and, incidentally, as the first novel of science fiction. Her novel had remained relevant over two centuries simply because Frankenstein was the archetype of the scientist whose research, pursued in the sacred name of increasing knowledge, takes on a life of its own and causes untold misery before being brought under control.

  How many of the ills of the modern world were not due precisely to Frankenstein’s folly! And that included the most overwhelming problem of all, a world too full of people. That had led to the war, and to untold misery before that, for several generations. And what had caused the overpopulation? Why, basically, those purely benevolent intentions of medical gentlemen who had introduced and applied theories of hygiene, of infection, of vaccination, and of inoculation, thereby managing to reduce the appalling infant mortality rate!

  Was there some immutable cosmic law which decreed that man’s good intentions should always thunder back about his head, like slates from a roof?

  My dim recollection was that there was discussion of such questions in Mary Shelley’s novel. I needed desperately to get hold of a copy of the book. But when had it first been published? I could not recall. Was it a mid-Victorian novel?

  There were some fragments of my education in English literature which did return to me. And that was why I drove eastwards along Lake Geneva. I thought I had a good idea of where at least one copy of the novel would certainly be.

  When I saw the next Gasthof coming up, I drew in to the side of the road, put on my raincoat, and walked along to it. I should mention that I had bought a few items of clothing that morning, before the trial began. I no longer looked quite such a time-traveler. (For most of the time, I had forgotten, was unable to remember, my previous existence!)

  I was ravenously hungry. At the Gasthof, they set before me a beautiful soup with dumplings in it, followed by a huge white sausage on a small alp of potato and onion-rings. This I washed down with lager from a great stein as monumentally carved as the Parthenon.

  As I picked my teeth and smiled to myself, I glanced at the newspaper which had been placed, furled on its stick, beside my plate. My smile sank under the horizon. The paper was dated Monday, August 26, 1816!

  But this was May... At first, my mind could not adjust to the missing three months, so that I sat stupidly with the paper in my hands, staring at it. Then I commenced a tremulous search through its pages, almost as if I expected to find details of a timeslip between Geneva and where I now was.

  The name of Frankenstein caught my eye. And there next to it stood Justine’s name. I read a short news item in which it was announced that Justine had been hanged the previous Saturday, the twenty-fourth, after several postponements of the event. She had been granted absolution of her sins, but had died protesting her innocence to the last. But—in my yesterday, Justine had still been alive. Where had June and July gone? How did August get there?

  Losing three months is a far nastier experience than being jolted back two centuries. Centuries are cold impersonal things. Months are things you live with. And three of them had just been whipped from under me. I paid my bill in very thoughtful fashion, and with a trembling hand.

  When I stood at the doorway, hesitating to dash into the pouring rain, I could see that the landscape had moved with the date. Two men who had come in to quaff down great glasses of Apfelsaft were now returning to their scythes in a field opposite, to join a line of sodden reapers there. The grapes that hung over mine host’s door were turning a dusky shade as the juice ripened in their skins. August was here.

  The Gasthof owner joined me at the door and stared with contempt at the sky. “I take it you’re a foreigner, sir? This is the worst summer we’ve had in these parts for a century, they do say.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, indeed it is. The worst summer in living memory. No doubt but the discharging of all the cannon and musketry at the field of Waterloo caused an injury to the normal temperament of the sky.”

  “Rain or no rain, I must get on my way. Can you tell me of an English poet staying in these parts?”

  He grinned broadly at me. “Bless you, sir, I can tell you of two English poets! England must have as many poets as soldiers, so liberally does she scatter them hereabouts. They’re staying not two leagues from this village.”

  “Two of them! Do you know their names?”

  “Why, sir, one’s the great Lord Byron, probably the most famous poet in the world, after Johann Schlitzberger—and a smarter dresser than Johann Schlitzberger he is, as well.”

  “The other English poet?”

  “He’s not famous.”

  “Shelley, is it?”

  “Yes, I believe that’s the name. He’s got a couple of women with him. They’re down along the road by the lake’s edge. You can’t miss them. Ask for the Villa Diodati.”

  I thanked him and hurried into the rain. What excitement was leaping inside me!

  VII

  * * *

  The rain had stopped. Cloud lay thick across the lake, hiding the mountain peaks beyond. I stood under trees, surveying the stone walls and vines of the Villa Diodati. My superior self was working out a way to approach and make myself known.

  Suppose I introduced myself to Shelley and Byron as a fellow traveler. How much better if I could have introduced myself as a fellow poet! But in 1816 there were no American poets whose names I could recall. Memory suggested that both Byron and Shelley had a taste for the morbid; no doubt they would enjoy meeting Edgar Allan Poe—yet Poe would be only a child still, somewhere across a very wide Atlantic.

  Social niceties were difficult to conduct across two hundred years. The fact that Lord Byron was probably the most famous poet in Europe at this time, even including Johann Schlitzberger, was not going to make things easier.

  As I prowled about outside the garden wall, it came on me with a start that a young man was regarding me over the barrel of a pistol. I stopped still in my tracks.

  He was a handsome young guy with a head of well-oiled reddish hair. He wore a green jacket, gray trousers, and high calf boots, and had a bold air about him.

  “I’d be obliged if you would cease to point that antique at me!” I said.

  “Why so? The tourist-shooting season opened today. I’ve bagged three already. You have only to come close enough to my hide and I let fly. I’m one
of the best marksmen in Europe, and you are possibly the biggest grouse in Europe.” But he lowered his pistol and came forward two paces.

  “Thank you. It would be embarrassing to be shot before we were introduced.”

  He was still not looking particularly friendly. “Then be off into the undergrowth, my feathered friend. It makes me feel more than somewhat persecuted to have items of the British public lurking about my property—particularly when most of them haven’t read two lines of my verse together.”

  I noted that he pronounced it in eighteenth-century fashion: “m’ verse.”

  Taking the binoculars from round my neck, I proffered them, saying, “You observe how amateur my lurking was—not only did I not conceal myself, but I did not use my chief lurking weapon. Have you ever seen the like of these, sir?”

  He tucked the gun into the top of his trousers. That was a good sign. Then he took the binoculars and peered at me through them.

  Clicking his tongue in approval, he swerved to take in the lake.

  “Let’s see if Dr. Polly is up to anything he shouldn’t be with our young Mistress Mary!”

  I saw him focus on a boat which lay almost stationary beneath its single sail, fairly close to shore. But I wanted to take him in while his eyes were off me. Being so close to Lord Byron was somewhat like being close to big game—a lion encountered at the foot of Kilimanjaro. Although not a tall man, he had considerable stature. His shoulders were broad, his face handsome; you could see his genius in his eyes and lips. Only his skin, as I inspected him from fairly close quarters, was pallid and blotchy. I saw that there were gray hairs among his auburn locks.

  He studied the sailing boat for a while, smiling to himself.

  Then he chuckled. “Tasso keeps them apart, though their fingers meet on the pillows of his pastoral. The triumph of learning over concupiscence! Polly itches for her, but they continue to construe. Red blood is nothing before a bluestocking!”