Frankenstein Unbound (22 page)

Speculation. Confirmation or otherwise must come later.

I jammed a magazine into the breach of the gun. Its code told me that one bullet in five was tracer. A gate was opening in the distant city. From beyond it, light poured over the two enormous figures. I began firing as they started to enter.

A bright line of fire plunged across the intervening space. I saw the first bullets strike, and kept on firing, mouth tight, eye jammed to the sight. One of the figures— the woman—seemed to blaze. She spun about. Her arms jerked up in anger. More tracer poured into her. She appeared to break apart as she fell.

He—he also was hit! But he ran away from the light, so that I no longer had a silhouette as target. I had lost him. Then the sight found him again! He was coming! Making full use of that terrible deadly speed, he was racing across the ice towards me, arms and legs plunging with a fleetness no human could rival. There was a glimpse of that cruel grinning helmet of a face as I wrenched the barrel round for better aim. It stuck.

Cursing, I looked down. One side of my sleeping bag had caught in the gun’s track. It was a moment’s work to tear it loose, but in that moment he was nearly up to me.

With a strength almost beyond myself, I raised the gun and fired it from my hip. The tracer caught him as he charged up the slope.

Fire burned at his chest. A great bellow of fury broke from him. He fell backwards, tearing at his burning clothes.

Shooting off just one burst of tracer had almost broken my body in two. I had to drop the swivel gun, collapsing to my knees as I did so.

But fear of the monster drove me on. I saw him roll smoking down the slope of the nunatak, to lie face down among rock and ice shards, flames licking at his foul greatcoat. The horses, in wild dismay, broke their tethers and went galloping away across the plains of ice.

Clutching my automatic, I went slowly down to where the great figure lay. It stirred now, turned over, drew itself into a sitting position. Its face was black. Smoke obscured it.

Even in ruin, the monster still exerted that tremendous paralysis of fascination which had deflected my purpose before. I leveled the gun at him, but did not fire—not even when I saw him gather himself to spring to his feet.

He spoke. “In trying to destroy what you cannot understand, you destroy yourself! Only that lack of understanding makes you see a great divide between our natures. When you hate and fear me, you believe it is because of our differences. Oh, no, Bodenland!—it is because of our similarities that you bring such detestation to bear upon me!”

He could not rise. A hollow cough burst from him, and a change took place in that abstract helmet which was his face. The sutures of Frankenstein’s surgery parted, ancient cicatrices opened at every contour; the whole countenance cracked, and I saw slow blood ooze in the apertures. He put a hand up—not to his cheeks but to his chest, where the greater pain was.

“We are of different universes!” I said to him. “I am a natural creature, you are a—a horror, unalive! I was born, you were made—”

“Our universe is the same universe, where pain and retribution rule.” His words were thick and slow. “Our deaths are both a quenching out. As for our births—when I first opened my eyes, I knew I existed—as did you. But who I was, or where, or from what cause, I knew not—no more did you! As for those intervals between birth and destruction, my intentions, however warped, are more lucid to me than yours to you, as I suspect. You know not compassion—”

A spasm of pain possessed him, so that he could not speak.

Again I nerved myself to fire; a rocket flashed into the sky and burst overhead, deflecting me from my purpose. It opened into three great clusters of flame which hung there, silent, before fading. A signal, perhaps—to whom or what I knew not.

Before the lurid light went out, the monster at my feet said, “This I will tell you, and through you, all men, if you are deemed fit to rejoin your kind: that my death will weigh more heavily upon you than my life. No fury I might possess could be a match for yours. Moreover, though you seek to bury me, yet will you continuously resurrect me! Once I am unbound, I am unbounded!”

On the word “resurrect,” delivered with ferocity, the fallen creature heaved himself to his feet and stood confronting me, fire still creeping at his chest and throat. Although he was below me on the slope, he dominated me.

I fired three times, aiming into that voluminous greatcoat. On the third shot, he went down onto one knee and gave a loud cry, clutching his head. When he looked up again, one side of his face, it appeared to me, had fallen away.

“There will be no more of you!” I said. Sudden triumph and calm filled me.

The creature was gone beyond my influence. He saw me no more. But he spoke again before he died. “They thought me gone, for I that day was absent, as befell, bound on a voyage uncouth and obscure, far on excursion towards the gates of hell, where...”

A last attempt to rise, then he lost balance and fell forward, lying face down, one arm twisted out sideways with a clumsy gesture, palm upwards. I left him amid ice and thin smoke, to climb back up the nunatak. The monster was finished, and my quest.

Trembling, I set the swivel-gun to rights. If other attackers came for me, they should meet the same reception as the monster before I met my Maker. Or there might be men in the city; I must assume nothing more until more was known. Certainly they were aware of my presence. Since the rocket died overhead, the lights were being extinguished behind the great ramparts, the activity was ending, the displays were being put away. They would know where I was, and what I had done.

So I would wait here until someone or something came for me, biding my time in darkness and distance.

Brian W. Aldiss
began his career as a bookseller in Oxford before becoming literary editor of the
Oxford Mail.
For many years a film reviewer and poet, Mr. Aldiss has since acquired a reputation as the author of two outspoken and best-selling novels,
The Hand-Reared Boy
and
A Soldier Erect
, the beginning of a series of six novels covering the life span of one man. But his main reputation, built up over many years, is as an innovative and imaginative writer of science fiction. His first novel,
Non-stop
, was published in 1958, and among his more recent books in this field have been
The Dark Light Years, Earthworks, Hothouse
and
Report on Probability
A. He is also the author of a history of science fiction called
Billion Year Spree.
In his midforties, Aldiss is twice married, has four children, and lives in tumbledown splendor in the Vale of the White Horse.