Frankenstein Unbound

by Aldiss, Brian

  Now he suddenly reappeared, clad in nothing but a pair of nankeen trousers, rushing down the stairs and leveling a pistol at my head!

  “Ho, ho! A stranger in our midst! Hold, signore, how did you get into Diodati! Fiend or human, speak or I shoot!” I jumped up in fright and anger. Shelley too leaped to his feet, shrieking, and knocked his chair over, so that Mary came running back into the room.

  Only Byron was unmoved. “Polly, stop behaving like a demented Tory at Calais! You are the stranger here, the fiend of Diodati. Kindly take yourself back upstairs and shoot yourself very very quietly, depositing your carcass somewhere where it will not annoy us!”

  “It’s a joke, Albé, isn’t it? It’s just my Latin temperament, like your Albanian songs, isn’t it?” The little doctor looked from one to the other of us, all concern, hoping for support.

  “As you well know, Polly, neither Lord Byron nor I have any sense of humor, being British,” said Shelley. “Kindly desist! You know how bad my nerves are!”

  “I’m so sorry—”

  “Dematerialize!” shouted Byron.

  As the man fled back upstairs, Byron added, “Heavens, but the man is stupid!”

  Mary said, “Even the stupid hate being made to look foolish!”

  The rain having petered out for a while, we all went outside to stare at the sunset, about which the two poets made lurid remarks. Claire Claremont arrived, giggling and nuzzling up to Byron when she could in a manner distinctly unlike her half sister’s. I thought she was a silly girl, and judged that Byron thought the same; but he was a lot more patient with her than he had been with Polidori.

  Nothing pleased me more than to be allowed to take supper with them. They were interested in my opinions but not my circumstances, so that I did not have to invent any tales about my past. Polidori came down to supper and sat next to me without saying anything. He and I were eating heartily when Byron threw down his fork and cried, “Oh for the horrors of polite society again! At least they knew how to treat meat! This is a mockery of mutton!”

  “Ah,” said Shelley, looking up from his carrots, “lampoon!”

  “That’s a very beefy pun for a vegetarian!” said Byron, laughing with the rest of us.

  “In a few generations, all mankind will be vegetarian,” said Shelley, waving a knife through the air. His conversation changed course with his moods. “Once it is generally realized that the animals are such close kin to us, then meat-eating will be disdained as too near to cannibalism for comfort. Can you imagine what a civilizing effect that will have on the multitude? A hundred years from now, the march of the physical sciences—oh, Albé, you should have talked to old Erasmus Darwin about that subject! He foresaw the time when steam would invade every domain—”

  “Just as it invaded this mutton?”

  “Steam is the basis of all the present-day improvements. Mind you, it’s only the very beginning of a revolutionary improvement in all things. We who have harnessed steam are now harnessing gas as another powerful servant. And we are merely the precursors of generations who will harness the great life-force of electricity!”

  “Well, that’s pretty good going,” said Byron. “That’s air, water, and fire. What are our enlightened descendants going to do about the fourth element, earth? Will they find some use for it, other than burying moldy bodies in it?”

  “The earth will be free to everyone. Don’t you see? Mary, you explain! With the elements as slaves, then for the first time in history slavery will be abolished. Human servitude will disappear, for servitors in the form of machines, powered by steam and electricity, will take over. And that means that a day of universal socialism will dawn. For the first time, there will be no masters and inferiors. All will be equal!”

  Byron laughed and stared down at his boots. “I doubt God ever intended that! He gives no sign of it!”

  “It’s not God’s intentions! It’s Man’s intentions! As long as Man’s intentions can be made to be good... It’s Man that has to put Nature right, you know, and not vice versa. We are all responsible for this fabulous world in which we have been born. I see the time coming when the human race will rule as it should rule, as benevolent gardeners, with a great garden in its care. And then perhaps, like the adventurers of Lucian, we can skip to the moon and cultivate that. And the other planets of the sun.”

  “Don’t you think mankind will have to change its basic nature a little before that happens, Percy?” Mary said timidly. Her eyes had rarely left his face, although he was now tramping about the room, gesticulating as he talked.

  “His nature will be changed by the changes he has already set afoot!” cried Shelley vehemently. “The old rotten complacent eighteenth-century order is gone for ever—we are marching towards an age, a realm of science, in which goodness will not be trampled underfoot by despair! Everyone will be a voice to be heard!”

  “What a Babel that will be! Your vision of the future frightens me,” Byron said. “What you predict is very well, and good for the intellectual pulses. What’s more, I’d love you to lecture to my confounded wife in that fashion and tell her that her rotten complacent way of life is over. But I don’t aspire to your Promethean vision of man. I see him as a servile little bugger! You spell him with a capital M, as in Murray; to me he is very lower-case. You see despair as something that can be rooted out by machines—some sort of a steamshovel, perhaps. But to me despair is a permanent part of man, induced by that specter of three-score years and ten. How can physical science change that unpleasant situation?

  “The natural order of things, with all its makeshift arrangements, I agree, is to be railed at. Youth, for instance, is something that should be awarded after a rather stiff examination to men of experience, not wasted on mere boys. But you would hand over the natural order to be managed by Parliament. Think how much worse that order would be if administered by the Norths and Castlereaghs of tomorrow!”

  “What I’m saying, Albé, is that machines will free all men, all the ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ of Gray’s poem. And then there will not be room at the head of a reformed social system for duds and vipers like North or Castlereagh. Ability will be able to speak unmuffled, honesty will be respected. Youth will not be shackled, because the distortions of the present order will be abolished, utterly abolished!”

  His eyes gleamed. He stood over Byron, searching Byron’s face. For all his dilettante airs, I could see that Byron too was all-absorbed in the theme.

  “Is it possible that machinery will banish oppression?” he asked. “The question is whether machines strengthen the good or the evil in man’s nature. So far, the evidence is not encouraging, and I suspect that new knowledge may lead to new oppression. The French Revolution was intended to remedy the natural order, but it changed very little. It certainly did not stop the corruption of power!”

  “But that is because the French still insist on having a top and bottom. Socialism will change all that! Just remember, it is the present order which is unnatural. We are working towards a more natural order, where inequality is done away with. By the time you and I are old men—”

  “Til have shot myself before that!”

  “By the time this century is finished—the whole planet, well, little Willmouse will live to see it, let’s hope... There are entirely new powers hovering in the air, condensing in the future, lurking in the minds of men, which can be summoned as Prospero summoned Ariel!”

  “Don’t forget he summoned Caliban, too! What happens if these new powers are seized by those in power already—who, after all, are in the best position to seize them?”

  “But that is why we need a new social order, Albé! Then the new power goes to all alike. What do you say to all this, Mr. Bodenland?”

  Shelley suddenly swung his luminous face towards me, sat quickly down on a chair, sticking out one leg and resting a hand on the thigh, clearly inviting me to hold the floor awhile.

  After all, thought I, I was the best qualified of those present to speak on
the subject of the future. And what a pleasure to speak to such receptive minds! I glanced at Mary. She was standing by Shelley, listening intently but saying nothing.

  “In one major respect, I’m sure you’re right,” I said, addressing myself to Shelley. “The new systems of machines now coming in have great power, and it is a power to change the world. In the cotton towns, you can already see that power looms are creating a new category of human being, the town laborer. As the machines become more complex, so he will become more of an expert. His experience will become centered on machines; eventually, his kind will become adjuncts of the machine. They will be called ‘a labor force.’ In other words, an abstract idea will replace a master/man relationship; but in practice the workings of a labor force may be just as difficult.”

  “But there will be equality—the labor force will control itself.”

  “No. It will not be freed, because it will generate its own bosses from within. Nor will it be freed by the machines. Instead, a culture will become enslaved by the machines. The second generation of machines will be much more complex than the first, for it will include machines capable of repairing and even reproducing the first generation! Not only will human goodness be unable to operate effectively in such a system: it will become increasingly irrelevant to it. Because the machines in their teeming millions, large and small, will have become symbols of class and prosperity, like horses to Red Indian tribes or slaves to Romans. Their acquisition and maintenance will increasingly occupy human affairs. Creator and created become locked in a life-and-death relationship.”

  “I suppose it’s possible... Man may enslave the elements but remain himself a slave.”

  “Nor must you imagine that all innovations will be fruitful. Imagine, for instance, a flying machine that will transport you from London to Geneva.”

  “There is a flying machine in Johnson’s Rasselas.”

  “Would you not think that such a machine would greatly open up commerce and cultural relationships between Switzerland and Britain? But suppose instead that the two countries quarreled because of some misunderstanding—then flying machines would carry weapons of devastation that could blast the two capitals to the ground!”

  “Precisely the conclusion that Johnson arrived at,” said Byron.

  “Yes, and as pessimistic with as little reason,” said Shelley swiftly. “Why should Britain and Switzerland fall out?”

  “Because the more they become involved in each other’s affairs, the more reason they have to fall out. You may quarrel with your neighbor; you are unlikely to quarrel with someone else’s neighbor in the next village. And so in other spheres. The greater the complexity of systems, the more danger of something going wrong, and the less chance individual will has of operating on the systems for good. First the systems become impersonal. Then they seem to take on a mind of their own, then they become positively malignant!”

  Silence for a moment, while we all gazed meditatively at the floor.

  “Then we are heading for a world full of Frankenstein monsters, Mary!” exclaimed Byron, slapping his leg. “For God’s sake, let’s take another drink, or shoot the dogs, or call Claire in to dance the fandango, rather than indulge ourselves in this misery! Is not the past of the human race gloomy enough for you, without supping upon the imaginary horrors of its future?”

  The mention of Frankenstein stopped me in midthought. So—was the novel then written? By this slender girl of eighteen!

  But the slender girl of eighteen was answering Lord Byron. “Milton’s sympathies would be with you, Albé:

  “‘Let no man seek

  Henceforth to be foretold what shall befall

  Him or his children...’

  “But my feelings are different, if I may state them. They perhaps correspond in some ways to those of our new friend, Mr. Bodenland. Our generation must take on the task of thinking about the future, of assuming towards it the responsibility that we assume towards our children. There are changes in the world to which we must not be passive, or we shall be overwhelmed by them, like children by an illness of which they have no comprehension. When knowledge becomes formulated into a science, then it does take on a life of its own, often alien to the human spirit that conceived it.”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “And always the pretense that the innovating spirit is so noble and good! Whereas the cellars of creativity are often stuffed with corpses...”

  “Don’t talk to me about corpses!” cried Shelley, jumping up. “Who knows but they may be lined up outside that very wall, waiting to flock in on us!” He pointed melodramatically, running a finger along in the air ahead of him, peering with burning eyes as if indeed watching an army of the dead, invisible to the rest of us. “I know about corpses! As the cycles of the air distribute moisture about the planet, so the legions of the dead march underground to distribute life! Do I sound so optimistic that I’m not always conscious of the short step between swaddling-bands and cerements? Mortality—that’s always the stumbling block! Your Frankenstein was correct in his basic idea, Mary—he sought first to create a race free from the bounds of ordinary human weakness! Would I had been so created! How I would stalk the world!”

  He gave a great shriek and rushed from the room.

  Byron pulled a funny face at Mary. “Think yourself lucky he don’t eat meat, ma’am, or there’s no knowing what he’d be up to!”

  “Percy’s so ethereal. I fear the world invisible is more visible to him than to the rest of us. I’d better go and calm him down.”

  “Mary, dear, one night when I have made a better meal than I did tonight, I plan to go a little berserk, too, in order to have your solace.”

  She smiled. “Oh, Claire will look after you, Lord Byron!”

  IX

  * * *

  That night, I slept in Chapuis! Byron would not have me in the larger house, claiming that the dogs would never tolerate my presence without howling all night. Shelley, ever one to aid society’s strays, invited me to his house. So I slept in a little damp attic room which smelled of apples, my head not very far away from the dream-troubled heads of Shelley and his mistress.

  Next morning, I was woken by the baby crying. I thought he probably set up a stronger howl than Byron’s dogs!

  It was a very ill-ordered household, Mary and Claire looking after it between them in a slapdash way. But I was in a bad mood with myself. I had forgotten my quest on the previous day in the pleasure of the poets’ company. Within twenty-four hours, Justine would be hanged, and I had not said a word to anyone about it.

  Then recollection returned to me. I had been involved in another timeslip, and this was a day in late August. The summer months of June and July had been stolen. My time scales were wrong. Just possibly, Justine still lived in Geneva; but in Chapuis she was now one with Shelley’s dead, marching underground...

  As I climbed from my cramped couch, I realized that my hope of helping the girl was also dead.

  But there was one thing I could do. I could eradicate Frankenstein’s monster. If I could borrow a copy of Mary’s book, I could map its route, ambush and kill it!

  What would Frankenstein do then? Would he make a second creature? Should I also anticipate that it was my duty to eradicate not only the monster but the author of monsters?

  I shelved that problem for a later date.

  One thing you see I had already accepted. I had accepted the equal reality of Mary Shelley and her creation, Victor Frankenstein, just as I had accepted the equal reality of Victor and his monster. In my position, there was no difficulty in so doing, for they accepted my reality, and I was as much a mythical creature in their world as they would have been in mine.

  As time was more devious than scientific orthodoxy would have us believe, so was reality still open to question, since time was one of the terms in its equation.

  Neither girl took a great deal of interest in me. Trunks were standing about half-packed, Claire was rushing madly about looking for her bonnet, Mary was
trying to comfort Willmouse, who was crying loudly and looked, I thought, rather a little shriveled thing. Occasionally, I caught glimpses of Shelley through the vines, skipping about in a somewhat girlish manner between the two houses and the little landing stage where their boats were moored; there were a collection of rowing boats and a masted boat with a deck which Claire referred to as “the schooner.”

  The weather was not too bad. A watery sun had come through, and wind was driving the mist away.

  “We’re all going to sail round to Meillerie while it’s fine,” Claire said. “I shall take my lute. Lord Byron so loves to hear me play!”

  It was obvious I was in the way. If they went sailing, there would be no chance to speak privately to Mary; in two days the Shelley party was leaving here, making for Geneva and thence to London. I crept back upstairs to my little room and spoke my account of the previous day’s events into my journal.

  In my pocket, I felt a folded piece of paper. It was the manuscript of Lord Byron’s poem which I had retrieved from the floor on the previous evening. I smoothed it out and read:

  I had a dream that was not quite a dream.

  The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars

  Did rush eternal through the darkling space,

  Trackless and rayless, while the frosted earth

  Hung blindly rotting in the moonless air.

  Morn came and went, and came, bringing no day,

  And men forgot their passions in their dread.

  Their habitations—lesser things than light—

  Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,

  So men could see once more each other’s face.

  Forests were set on fire...

  failing...

  The meagre by the meagre were devoured,

  For all were starving by degrees; but two

  Of an immense necropolis survived...