Brian Aldiss - Frankenstein Unbound

The gates of Geneva were open. Wagons were going out empty, heading for the forest. I saw a spanking stage emerge and take the road that led to Chamonix, its four horses stepping high. Frankenstein entered between the grey walls, and I ceased to follow him.

This record so far has been dictated in one long burst. After watching Victor Frankenstein walk towards his father’s house, I came through Geneva and back to Sècheron and my automobile. The Felder was as I had left it; I climbed in and put this account in my portable tape-memory.

My heart-searchings must have no place here. Before getting to the murder trial, I will note two incidents that occurred in Geneva. Two things I wanted above all, and one of them was money, for I knew old systems of currency were in operation throughout the nineteenth century. The second thing I found quickly by looking at a newspaper in a coffee-shop: the day’s date. It was May 23rd, 1816.

I scanned the paper for news. It was disappointingly empty of anything I could comprehend; mainly there was local news, with a great deal of editorializing about the German Constitution. The name of Carl August of Saxe-Weimar figured largely, but I had heard neither of him nor of it. Perhaps I had naively expected headlines of the HUMPHRY DAVY INVENTS MINERS’ SAFETY LAMP, ROSSINI WRITES FIRST OPERA, HENRY THOREAU BORN, kind of thing! At least the newspaper’s editorial columns served to remind me that Geneva had become part of Switzerland only in the previous year.

My quest for money also held its disappointments. I had on my wrist – besides my CompC phone, now useless – a new disposable watch, powered by a uranium isotope and worth at least seventy thousand dollars at current going price in U.S.A., 2020. As a unique object in Geneva, 1816, how much greater should its value be! Moreover, the Swiss watchmakers were the best equipped in the world at this time to appreciate its sophistication.

Full of hope, I took the watch in to a smart business in the Rue du Rhône, where it was examined by a stately manager.

‘How do you open it?’ he asked.

‘It won’t open. It is sealed shut.’

‘Then how does one examine the works if something goes wrong?’

‘That is the whole virtue of this particular make of watch. It does not go wrong. It is guaranteed never to go wrong!’

He smiled very charmingly at me.

‘Certainly its defects are very well concealed. So too is the winder!’

‘Ah, but it does not wind. It will go forever – or at least for a century. Then it stops, and one throws it away. It is a disposable watch.’

His smile grew still sweeter. He looked at my clothes, all creased and still damp from the night’s activities. ‘I observe you are a foreigner, m’sieu. I presume this is a foreign watch. From the Netherlands, perhaps?’

‘It’s North Korean,’ I said.

With the tenderest of smiles, he proffered my watch to me in an open palm. ‘Then may I suggest you sell your unstoppable watch back to the North Koreans, m’sieu!’

At two other establishments I had no better luck. But at a fourth I met an inquisitive little man who took greatly to the instrument, examining it under magnifying glasses and listening to its working through a miniature stethoscope.

‘Very ingenious, even if it is powered by a bee who will expire as you leave my premises!’ he said. ‘Where was it made?’

‘It’s the latest thing from North America.’ I was learning caution.

‘Such a timepiece! What is this “N.K.” inscribed on its face?’

‘It stands for New Kentucky.’

‘I have not even seen this metal before. It interests me, and I shall have pleasure taking it apart and examining its secrets.’

‘Those secrets could set you a century ahead of all rival watchmakers.’

We began arguing over prices. In the end, I accepted a derisory sum, and left his shop feeling sore and cheated. Yet, directly I stepped out into the sunshine again, my superior self took over, and I looked at the matter differently. I had good solid francs in my pocket, and what did the watchmaker have? A precision instrument whose chief virtues were useless to anyone in this age. Its undeviating accuracy in recording the passage of time to within one twenty-millionth of a second was a joke in a world that still went largely by the leisurely passage of the sun, where stage-coaches left at dawn, noon, or sunset. That wretched obsession with time which was a hallmark of my own age had not yet set in; there were not even railway timetables to make people conform to the clock.

As for the workings of the watch, there was another item this world was mercifully without: uranium. That element had been a twentieth-century discovery and, within a few years of its first refinement, had been used in new and more powerful weapons of destruction.

Even in the United States of Korea – in my day, one of the foremost manufacturing countries of the world, with the deepest mantle-mines – in 1816, the peoples of the Korean peninsula would be painting exquisite scenes on silk and carving delicate ivory. Between slaying each other by the sword, admittedly, in preparation for more energetic centuries to come …

The more I thought about it, the shedding of my watch became symbolic, and I rejoiced accordingly.

If I was learning about time, I was also learning about my legs. They brought me through the city and back to Sècheron in good order. I had not walked so far for years.

I’m in the automobile now, my last little bastion of the twenty-first century. It is uranium-powered too. I returned to the spot where my home once stood, looked affectionately at Tony’s bright plastic ball in the knot of pampas, and left a plastic message pad beside it with a message for Mina, in case the area does a timeslip again and she happens to be there.

This brings my record up-to-date. I must sleep before relating what happened at the murder trial. I am fit and charged with excitement, beside myself in a strangely literal way. Maybe it is obvious what I shall be compelled to do next.

Before I describe the trial of Justine Moritz, I must set down what I know about Frankenstein, in the hope of clarifying my mind.

The little I know is little enough. Victor Frankenstein is the eponymous central character of a novel by Mary Shelley. He amalgamated parts of human bodies to create a ‘monster’, which he then brought to life. The monster wreaked destruction on him and his house. Among the general public, the name of creator and created became confused.

I remember reading the novel as a child, when it made a great impression on me, but the deplorable pastiches and plagiarizations put out by the mass media have obliterated my memory of the original details. Although I know that the novel was published in the nineteenth century, the actual date escapes me. The author was Mary Shelley, wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but very little of her life comes back to memory. Also, I had the impression that Victor Frankenstein was purely an invented character; however, recent events have somewhat shaken my preconceptions of probability!

From the first moment I set eyes on Frankenstein, at the hotel in Sècheron, I had the impression of a man with a burdensome secret. After selling my watch, I thought further about him, and perceived a link between his past and my future. The aspirations of the society of my day were mirrored in miniature in that watch: the desire that it should never need maintenance, should never run down. Such were Victor Frankenstein’s perfectionist obsessions in relation to human anatomy, when he began his investigations into the nature of life. When he reflected on how age and death laid waste man’s being, and saw a means of interfering with that process, he acted as harbinger to the Age of Science then in its first dawn.