Dracula Unbound

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Dracula Unbound

Brian W. Aldiss

For Frank

who was sitting at our dining table

when the specter arose

Nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf
.

Gondwana Ranch

Gondwana, Texas 75042

U.S.A
.

August 18, 1999

Dearest Mina
,

Soon we'll be living in a new century. Perhaps there we shall discover ill defined states of mind, at present unknown. You, who have returned from the dead, will be better able to face them than I
.

For my own part, I am more prepared than I was to acknowledge that many people spend periods of their lives in more unusual mental states
—
not neurotic or psychotic
—
than science is at present inclined to allow. I also know those nameless psychic states valued by many rebels of society. They are not for me. In the account that follows
—
in which we both feature
—
there's terror, horror, wonder, and something that has no name. A kind of nostalgia for what has never been experienced
.

Did all this happen? Was I mad? Did you pass through those dreadful gates set at the end of life? I still see, with shut eyes but acute mental vision, those unhallowed things that appeared. And I believe that I would rather be mad than that they should run loose on the world
.

Have patience and hope. We still have a long way to go together, dearest
.

Your loving Joe

NOW YORK
, May 24—A sale of books was held in the auction rooms of Christie, Manson & Woods, Park Avenue, New York, on May 23, 1996.

A first edition of Bram Stoker's novel
Dracula
was sold for $6,900 to an anonymous buyer. The volume was published in Cr. 8vo. by Constable & Co. of Westminister, in May 1897, bound in yellow boards blocked in red. This copy was in remarkably fine condition.

On the flyleaf was written, in faded Stephens ink:

To Joseph Bodenland
,

Who gave the mammals their big chance
—

And me a title
—

Affectionately
,

This perplexing message was dated
Chelsea, May 1897
, and signed with a flourish by the author, Bram Stoker.

Prologue

In a region of the planet enduring permanent twilight stood the Bastion.

All the territory about the Bastion was as wrinkled and withered as aged skin. Low ground-hugging plants grew there, some with rudimentary intelligence, capable—like the creatures inhabiting the Bastion—of drinking human blood.

Six men were walking in single file through this dangerous area, progressing toward the dark flanks of the Bastion. The men were joined to each other by metal chains clamped to their upper arms. In the heat of the perpetual evening, they were scantily clad. They went barefoot.

They made no haste as they progressed forward, walking with heads and shoulders drooping, their dull gaze fixed on the ground. The stiffness of their movements owed less to the weight of their chains than to a prevailing despair, to which every limb of their bodies testified.

Low above them flew the guardian of this human line. The flier exhibited a degree of majesty as his great wings beat their way slowly through the viscous air. He was as much a creature of custom as the six men below him, his duty being merely to see that they returned to the warrens of the Bastion.

Before their fighting spirit was eroded, these six had often in the past plotted escape. It was rumored that somewhere ruinous cities still stood, inhabited by tribes of men and women who had managed to hold out against the Fleet Ones as the centuries declined: that somewhere those virtues by which humans had once set great store were still preserved, against the onslaught of night.

But no one incarcerated in the Bastion knew how to reach the legendary cities. Few had stamina enough to endure a long journey overland.

All the six desired at present was to return to their prison. Their shift as cleaners in the Mechanism was over for the day. Soup and rest awaited them. The horror of their situation had long since dulled their senses. In the underground stabling, where humans and animals were indifferently herded together, the myrmidons of the Fleet Ones would bring round their rations. Then they could sleep.

As for the weekly levy of blood to be paid while they slept … even that nightmare had become mere routine.

So they negotiated the path through the blood-thirst-plants and came with some relief to the stoma gaping at the base of the Bastion, waiting to swallow them. The guardian alighted, folded away his wings, and directed them through the aperture. Hot and fetid air came up to meet them like a diseased breath.

The concretion into which they disappeared rose high into the saffron-tinted atmosphere, dominating the landscape in which it stood. It resembled a huge anthill. No conceptions of symmetry or elegance of any kind had entered the limited minds of its architects. It had reared itself upward on a random basis. Its highest central point resembled a rounded tower, reinforcing the impression that the whole structure was a kind of brute phallus which had thrust its way through the body of the planet.

Here and there on the flanks of the Bastion, features obtruded. Some resembled malformed limbs. Some twisted upward, or sideways. Some turned down and burrowed again into the ravaged soil, serving as buttresses to the main structure.

The main portions of the Bastion lay below-ground, in its unending warrens, stables, and crypts. The structure above-ground was blind. Not a window showed. The Fleet Ones were no friends of light.

Yet on higher levels orifices gaped, crudely shaped. Much coming and going was in evidence at these vents. Here the Fleet Ones could conveniently launch themselves into flight: as they had done at the beginning of time, so now at its end.

Only the orifice at the top of the pile, larger than all the others, was free of sinister traffic. It was reserved for the Prince of Darkness himself, Lord Dracula. This was his castle. He would launch himself from this great height whenever he was about to go on a mission into the world—as even now he was preparing to do.

As the shift of six began its winding descent into underground levels, to rest in the joyless inanition of slaves, four other men of a different caliber were preparing to leave the Mechanism.

These four, in luckier days, had been scientists. Captive, they remained free of shackles so that they could move without impediment in the building. The genetically nonscientific species who held them in captivity had abducted them from various epochs of past history. They were guarded; but because they were necessary for the maintenance of the Mechanism, their well-being within the Bastion was assured. They merely had to work until they died.

The leader of the quartet came down from the observatory, checking the time on his watch.

The leader, elected by common consent, was a tall man in his late thirties. The Fleet Ones had captured him from the Obsidional Century. His brilliant mind and indomitable spirit were such that the others took courage from him. Someone had once claimed that his brain represented the flowering of the sapient
Homo sapiens
. The plan about to be transformed from theory into action was a product of his thought.

“We have two minutes to go, friends,” he said now, as they were closing down their instruments.

The Mechanism—ignorantly so called by the Fleet Ones—was a combined solar observatory and power house. All space observatories had long been destroyed by the deteriorating sun.

It was the power function which was all important. The platforms of the Mechanism, shelving out like giant fungi, controlled solar satellites which drained the energies of the sun. These energies were redirected to meet the needs of the Fleet Ones—and in particular the needs of the Fleet Ones' single innovatory form of transportation.

The scientists were forced to work for their hated enemies. They ran everything as inefficiently as possible. Because the Mechanism was lighted brilliantly to allow the humans to work, the Fleet Ones would not enter. They posted their guardians outside, continually circling the immense structure.

“Delay here,” said the leader sharply. The four of them were in the foyer, preparing to go off shift and be returned to the Bastion. He glanced again at his watch.

“According to our predictions, there's now a minute to go.”

Beyond the glass doors, they could see the familiar tarnished landscape like a furrowed brow. In the distance, failed hills, shattered riverbeds, all lost in an origami of light and shade. Nearer at hand, the prodigious thrust of the Bastion, circled by leathery fliers. As a sudden stormy wind buffeted them, the fliers resembled dead leaves blowing at autumn's call. Shunning the light, they had no knowledge of the phenomenon approaching from space.

Just outside the doors, fluttering like a bat, the lead guardian on duty came down to an unsteady landing. He braced himself against the wind.

Lifting a hand to shield his brow, he stared in at the scientists, his red eyes set amid the dark skin and fur of the sharp-fanged visage. He beckoned to them.

They made some pretense of moving toward the doors, heading instead for a metal reception counter.

Thirty seconds to go.

The lower western sky was filled with a sun like an enormous blossom. It was the flower which had already destroyed all the flowers of Earth. Imperfectly round, its crimson heart crackled with stamens of lightning. The solar wind blew its malevolent pollens about the planets. Round it orbited the four solar stations which were leaching it of its energies, sucking them down into the subterranean storehouses of the Mechanism. On the face of this great helium-burner moved vortices which could swallow worlds. They showed like rashes of a disease, as if they worked at the debridement of an immense bloated organ.