Frankenstein Unbound

by Aldiss, Brian

  How has this small improvement arisen?

  (Of course, I use this particular approach to a general question because I have the subject of prison brought to my notice with a vengeance. But I fancy that if I found myself on the field of Waterloo with a foot missing, or in a dentist’s chair without benefit of anesthetic—a future form of laudanum—or faced with a work situation in which my family were slowly being starved and degraded, then my conclusions might reasonably be the same.)

  Between your age and mine, Mary, the great mass of people have become less coarse. Beautiful though your age is, many though the intellects that adorn it, and ugly though my age is, cruel many of its leaders, I believe that the period from which I come is to be preferred to yours in this respect. People have been educated to care more, upon the whole. Their consciences have been cultivated.

  We no longer lock up the mentally deranged, although they were locked up until well into the twentieth century; certainly we do not allow them to be paraded for the general amusement of our population. The population would no longer be amused. (How I loved you when you said to Lord Byron, “Even the stupid hate being made to look foolish!”!)

  We no longer hang a man because, in despair for his family, he steals a sheep or a loaf of bread. Indeed we no longer hang men for anything, or kill them by any other method. We long ago ceased to enjoy hanging as a public spectacle. Nor do we imprison children.

  Nor do we any longer allow children to become little workhorses for their fathers or for any other man. Child labor was stopped before your century drew to its end. Instead, educational acts were enforced, slowly, step by step, in tune with general opinion on the issue, in accord with the dictum that politics is the art of the possible.

  Indeed, the whole emphasis of education has changed. Education, except for the sons of lords, was once directed at fitting a man for a job and, cynics would add, unfitting him for life. Now, with complex machines themselves capable of performing routine jobs, education concentrates to a great extent on equipping young men and women for life, and living better and more creatively. It may have come too late, but it has come.

  We no longer allow the old to starve when their usefulness to the community is ended. Pensions for the aged came in at the beginning of the twentieth century. Geriatry is now a subject which is afforded its own ministry in the affairs of government.

  We no longer allow the weak or foolish or unfortunate to perish in the gutters of a city slum. Indeed, slums in the old sense have been almost abolished. There are now such a variety of welfare systems as would amaze you and Shelley. If a man loses his job, he receives unemployment benefits. If he falls sick, he receives sickness benefits. There is a public health service which takes care of all illnesses free of charge.

  So I could go on. Although in your native country, England, there are in my epoch six times as many people as in 1816, nevertheless, the individual is guaranteed a much better chance to lead a life free from catastrophe and, if catastrophe occurs, a much better chance to be helped to recover.

  (Do I make it sound like a paradise, a utopia, a socialist state such as would delight Shelley’s and your father’s hearts? Well, remember that all this equality has only been achieved in one small part of the globe, and then mainly at the expense of the rest of the globe; and that this inequality, once such a national feature, is now such an international feature that it has led to a bitterly destructive war between rich and poor nations; and remember that that inequality is fed by an ever-hardening racial antagonism which enlightened men regard as the tragedy of our age.)

  What accounts for these social improvements across the whole field of human affairs, between your age and mine? Answer: the growth of social conscience in the general mass of people.

  How was that growth fostered?

  The burden of Frankenstein’s argument is that man’s concern is to put Nature to rights. I believe that when his successors were actively engaged in that process, they often made devastating mistakes. Of late, my generation has perforce had to count up the debit column of all those mistakes, and in so doing has forgotten the benefits.

  For the gifts of Frankenstein include not only material things like the seat coverings which you admired in my automobile—or the automobile itself! They include all the intangible welfare gifts I have enumerated—at what I fear you will think is “some length”! One of the direct results of science and technology has been an increase in production, and a “spin-off” or yield of such things as anesthetics, principles of bacteriology and immunology and hygiene, better understanding of health and illness, the provision of machines to do what women and children were earlier forced to do, cheaper paper, vast presses to permit the masses to read, followed by other mass media, much better conditions in homes and factories and cities —and on and on in a never-ending list.

  All these advances have been real, even when dogged by the ills of which I told you. And they have brought a change in the nature of people. I’m talking now about the masses, the great submerged part of every nation. In the Western democracies, those masses have never again suffered the dire oppression that they suffered in England until almost the 1850s, when sometimes laboring men, particularly in country districts, might never have a fire in their hearths or taste meat all week, and faced death if they trapped a rabbit on the local lord-of-the-manor’s land. People have been able to become softer since those ill times, thanks to the great abundance for which technology is directly responsible.

  If you kick a child all his schooldays, force him to labor sixteen hours a day seven days a week, yank out his teeth with forceps when they ache, bleed him when he is ill, beat him throughout his apprenticeship, starve him when he falls on bad times, and finally let him die in the workhouse when he ages prematurely, then you have educated a man, in the best way possible, to be indifferent. Indifferent to himself and to others.

  Between your age and mine, dear Mary, a reeducation has taken place. The benefits of a growing scientific spirit have formed an overwhelming force behind that reeducation.

  Of course, that’s not the end of the story. To have an overwhelming force is one thing, to direct it quite another.

  And the chief direction has come in your century—in your heroic century!—from poets and novelists. It is your husband-to-be who declares (or will declare, and of course I may misquote) that poets are mirrors of the tremendous shadows which futurity casts upon the present, and the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He is absolutely right, save in one particular: he should have specifically included novelists with poets.

  But in your present, in 1816, novels are not much regarded. Their great day is to come in the next generation, for the novel becomes the great art form of the nineteenth century, from Los Angeles to New York, from London and Edinburgh to Moscow and Budapest. The novel becomes the flower of humanism.

  The names of these directors of change in your country alone are still recalled, novelists who seized on the great socio-scientific changes of their day and molded a more sensitive appreciation of life to respond to it: Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, the Bronte sisters, Charles Reade, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, your friend Peacock, many others. And especially the beloved Charles Dickens, who perhaps did more than any man in his century—including the great legislators and engineers— to awaken a new conscience in his fellow men. Dickens and the others are the great novelists—and every other Western country can offer rival names, from Jules Verne to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—who truly mirror the tremendous futurities and shape the hearts of people. And you, my dear Mary, respected though your name is—you are insufficiently regarded as the first of that invaluable breed, preceding them by at least one whole generation!

  Thanks to the work of your moral forces, powered by the social change which always and only comes from technological innovation, the future from which I come is not entirely uninhabitable. On the one hand, there is the sterility of machine culture and the terrible isolation often felt by people even i
n overcrowded cities; on the other hand, there is a taking for granted of many basic rights and freedoms which in your day have not even been thought of.

  How I think of them now! My case can attract no eager newsmen. I can call on no congressman to worry on my behalf. I may expect no mass media to crusade, no millions of strangers to become suddenly familiar with my name and anxious for my cause. I’m stuck in a cell with a reeking bucket, and two hundred years to wait before justice can be done, and be seen to be done. Do you wonder I now see the positive side of the technological revolution?!

  If you can summon Victor, as Prospero summoned his unhappy servants, or help me in any other way, then I’ll be grateful. But hardly more grateful than I am already, if grateful is an adequate enough word! Meanwhile, I send you these meditations, hoping they may help you to continue your great book.

  And with the meditations, less perishable than a willow leaf,

  My love,

  JOE BODENLAND

  XIII

  * * *

  Some of the grand sidereal events of the universe are more accessible at night. With humanity forced into the undignified retreat of its collective beds, the processes of Earth come into their own. Or so I have found.

  Exactly why it should be so, I do not know. Certainly night is a more solemn period than day, when the withdrawal of the sun’s influence enforces a hush on activity. But I never had any terror of the dark, and was not like Shakespeare’s man, “in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear...” So my theory is that while we are in Earth’s shadow and intended to be dreaming, our minds may be wider open than by day. In other words, some of that subconscious world which has access to us in dreams may seep through under cloak of night, giving us a better apprehension of the dawn of the world, when we were children—or when mankind was in its childhood.

  However that may be, I woke before dawn next day, and just by lying alert on my miserable bunk, was able to let my intelligence spread like mist beyond the narrow confines of the prison. My senses took me through the bars that confined me. I was aware of the cold stone outside, the little huddling rooms of the citizens of Geneva, and of the natural features beyond, the great lake and the mountains, whose peaks would already be saluting a day still unperceived in the city. A barnyard cock crowed distantly—that most medieval of sounds.

  I knew something was wrong.

  Something had woken me. But what?

  My senses strained again.

  Again the cockerel, its cry a reminder to me—like the little cake that Proust dipped in his tea—that time is a complex thing, stronger than any tide, yet so fragile it can be traversed instantaneously on a familiar sound or smell. Had another timeslip occurred?

  There was something wrong! I sat up, huddling my blanket against my chest.

  Not so much a sound as a sensation that a whole spectrum of sound was missing. And then I knew! It was snowing!

  It was snowing in July!

  That was why I held my blanket about me. It was cold, whereas the cell had been stiflingly hot when I fell asleep. It was cold that accounted for my sluggishness in detecting what was wrong.

  Snow was falling steadily over the prison, over Geneva, in midsummer... I hauled myself up and peered out of the bars.

  My view was limited to the sight of a wall, a tower over it, and a small patch of sky. But I saw torches moving, less powerful than lighted matches against the first crack of tarnished gold in the eastern sky. And there was the snow, gray against gray.

  Then the sound, very distant, of a bugle.

  A faint smell of woodsmoke.

  And another sound, more alarming. The sound of water. Perhaps always an alarming noise for a man trapped in a small space.

  How long I stood there, trembling with cold and a nameless apprehension, I have no idea. I listened to attendant noises coming on gradually—the scuffles and grunts and curses of men near at hand, a more distant din of shod feet moving at the double, shouted commands. And always that sound of water, growing fast. People were running now, in the corridor outside my cell.

  Panic communicates itself without words. I threw myself against the cell door and hammered and shouted, crying to be let out. Then the water hit the prison.

  It arrived in a great flood, a shock-wave of water that could be felt and heard. A second’s lull, then such a din! Shouts, screams, and the thunder of inundation.

  In a moment, a wave must have swept across the prison yard outside. It struck the wall, and a great cascade burst upwards, some of it to come flying through the cell window. The shock started me hammering at my door again. The whole prison was in a confusion of sound, with the echo of slamming doors added to all the rest of the din.

  And worse was to come. The water that spurted through my window was a mere splash. More came welling and flooding under the door, so that I suddenly found it all about my ankles. It was icy.

  I jumped onto my bunk, still yelling for release. The light filtering in was enough to reveal a darkly gleaming surface of water, turbulent, continually rising. Already it was almost on a level with my straw paillase.

  My cell was on the ground floor—slightly below the level of the ground, in fact, so that the window had afforded me, on occasion, a view of a warder’s waist, belt, keys, and truncheon, as he marched by. Now another wave splashed in. As I looked up, I saw that water was beginning to slop in and trickle down the wall. The yard outside must be flooded to a depth of about three feet. In no time, all prisoners on my level would be drowning— the water outside was already almost above our heads.

  Now the din from my fellow prisoners multiplied. I was not the only one who had made this uncomfortable observation.

  Splashing through the dark flood, I was again throwing myself at the door when a key turned in its great lock and it opened.

  Who set me free—warder or prisoner—I have no idea. But there was someone at least in that dreadful place who had a thought for others besides himself.

  The passage was a ghastly limbo between death and life, a place were men fought and screamed in semidarkness to get out, splashing up to their crotches in fast-moving water. And it was a matter of fighting! To lose your foothold was to be trodden down. A man from a cell ahead of mine, a slight figure, was knocked aside by two more powerful men working together. He went down. The crowd poured on and over him, and he fell beneath the flood.

  When I got to the spot, I groped beneath the water to try and find him and drag him up, but could find nothing. Strong though my anxiety was to save him, nothing could force me to duck my head voluntarily beneath that stinking flood. Then I found what had happened to him, for there were two unseen steps down. I also missed my footing and went plunging forward, only by luck managing to keep myself upright.

  Now the water was chest-high—more than that as we struggled round a corner, to meet a great frothing wave. But a wider corridor joined here, leading to another wing, and then there was a broader flight of steps up, and a rail to grip. It was like climbing a waterfall, but there was a warder at the top, clinging to a railing and yelling to us to hurry—as if we needed such encouragement.

  What a scene in the yard! What filth and terror and tumult! The water was littered with obstacles, and there were painful things below the water to strike oneself on. But the level was lower and the rush of the flood less severe than in more restricted surroundings, so that that insurmountable dread of drowning gradually subsided.

  The gates of the prison had been flung open, after which it was up to everyone to save himself. It was still snowing. At last I was under the shadow of the prison arch, splashing and gasping with other ill-glimpsed men. Then we were out of the prison. I caught a horrifying sight of a great sea stretching among the buildings, of people and animals weltering in it, before turning with the rest of the mob in a rush for higher ground.

  XIV

  * * *

  Hours later, resting myself and my battered legs in a shallow cave on a hillside, I return
ed to something like my senses.

  Although it would be mad to claim that I felt happy, my first feeling was one of cheer that I had escaped from prison. Presumably, the time would come, after the crisis was over, when the prison authorities would institute a hunt to recover their prisoners. But that time must remain a few days ahead yet, while everything lay in the throes of a natural disaster—the nature of which had yet to be determined—and while the snow still fell as thickly as it did. I would prepare myself for flight later, for I was determined not to be caught again; meanwhile, I needed warmth and food.

  In my pockets was a disposable butane lighter. There was no trouble in that respect. All I needed was fuel, and I would have a fire going.

  I hobbled out onto the hillside. My left knee throbbed from a wound it had received in my escape, but for the moment I ignored it. Visibility was down to a few yards. I stood in a white wilderness, and perceived that to gather wood for burning in such conditions was not easy.

  However, I applied myself. Enduring the snow that slid onto my back and shoulders, I rooted about the bases of small trees. So I gradually amassed armfuls of small twigs, which I carried back to my cave. My search took me further from base with each load. After four loads, I came across footprints in the snow.

  Like Robinson Crusoe on his island, I trembled at the sight. The prints were large and made by strongly fortified boots. So thickly was the snow falling that I knew they could only just have been made, probably within the past five minutes. Somebody was close by me on the hillside.

  Looking about, I could see nothing. The snow was like glaucoma. An image of a great figure with obscured face and mighty vigor returned unpleasantly to my mind. But I went on grubbing for wood.