Frankenstein Unbound. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ I had kept away from people and villages so far, I knew this was a well inhabited part of the world. I had seen many people in the distance. The scenery was alpine, with broad green valleys surmounted by mountain peaks. More distant were higher peaks, tipped with snow. The bottoms of the valleys contained dashing streams, winding tracks, and picturesque little villages made of pretty wooden houses huddling together. Every village had its church spire; every hour was signalled by a bell chiming in the spires; the sound came clear down the valleys. The mountainsides were strewn with spring flowers. There were cows among the tall grasses – cows with solemn bells about their necks which donged as they moved. Above them, little wooden huts were perched in higher meadows.

      It was a beautiful and soothing place. It was just not anything you might encounter in Texas, not if you went back or forward a million years. But it looked mighty like Switzerland.

      I know Switzerland well, or did on my own time track.

      My years in the American Embassy in Brussels had been well spent. I learnt to speak French and German fluently, and had passed as much leave as I could travelling about Europe. Switzerland had become my favourite country. At one time I had bought a chalet just outside Interlaken.

      So I walked into the town. A board on the outskirts gave its name as Sècheron and listed times of Holy Mass. Overhanging balconies, neat piles of kindling wood against every wall. A rich aroma of manure and wood smoke, pungent to my effete nostrils. And a sizeable inn which, with antique lettering, proclaimed itself to be the Hôtel Dejean. The exterior was studded with chamoix horns and antlers of deer.

      What gave me a thrill – why, outside the low door, two men were unloading something from a cart; it was the carcass of a bear! I had never seen that before. What was more, I could understand what the men were saying; although their accents were strange, their French was perfectly comprehensible.

      As soon as I entered a cheerful low room with oil lamps burning, I was greeted by the host. He asked me a lot of suspicious questions, and eventually I was shown to what must have been the poorest room in his house, over the kitchen, facing a hen-run. It mattered not to me. A servant girl brought me up water, I washed and lay back on the bed to rest before dinner. I slept.

      When I woke, it was without any idea of time. The timeslip had upset my circadian rhythms. I knew only that it was dark, and had been for some while. I lay there in a sort of wonderment, listening to a rich world of sound about me. The great wooden chalet creaked and resonated like a galleon in full sail. I could hear the voices of the wood, and human voices, as well as snatches of song and music. Somewhere, cowbells sounded; the animals had been brought in for the night, maybe. And there was that wonderful world of smells! You might say that the thought uppermost in my mind was this: Joe Bodenland, you have escaped the twenty-first century!

      My sleep had done something for me. Earlier in the day, I had been close to despair. Driving the Felder, I looked back towards the ranch and found it had disappeared. I had left it only twenty minutes earlier. In complete panic, I turned the car around and drove back to where the house had been. I knew exactly where it stood because one of our pampas bushes was there and, in the middle of it, a coloured ball of Tony’s. Nothing else. The ranch, the children, all had snapped back to their normal time.

      Blackest despair – now total euphoria! I was a different man, full of strength and excitement. Something the innkeeper had said when I made apologies for possessing no luggage had begun to tip my mood.

      ‘General Bonaparte has a lot to answer for. He may be safely out of the way again now, but a lot of decent people have no safety and no homes.’

      He had taken me for some kind of refugee from the Napoleonic Wars! They had finished in 1815, with Napoleon’s banishment to St Helena. So the date was some time shortly after that.

      You think I could take such knowledge calmly? Mina, will you ever hear these tapes? Don’t you see, as far as I knew, I was the first man ever to be displaced in time, though no doubt the timeslips were now making a regular thing of it. I remembered reading the old nursery classic, Herbert Wells’s The Time Machine, but Wells’s time-traveller had gone ahead in time. How much nicer to go back. The past was safe!

      I was back in history! Something had come over me. Rising from the bed, I felt curiously unlike myself. Or rather, I could feel the old cautious Bodenland inside, but it seemed as if a new man, fitted for decision and adventure, had taken control of me. I went downstairs to demand supper.

      Men were drinking there by a fire, beneath a cuckoo-clock. There were tables, two empty, two occupied. One of the occupied tables contained a man and woman and child, tucking in to great slabs of meat. At the other occupied table sat a lean-visaged but elegant man in dark clothes, reading a paper by candle-light as he ate.

      Ordinarily, I would have chosen an empty table. In my new mood, I went over to the solitary man and said easily, pulling out a chair, ‘May I sit at your table?’

      For a moment I thought my accent had not been understood. Then he said, ‘I can’t stop you sitting here,’ and lowered his head to his paper again.

      I sat down. The innkeeper’s daughter came across to me, and offered me a choice of trout or venison. I ordered trout with white wine to accompany it. She was back promptly with a chilled wine and bread rolls with crisp brown crust and thick doughy interior, which I broke and ate with covert greed. How heady was my excitement, tasting that historic food!

      ‘May I offer you a glass of wine?’ I said to my table companion. He had an earthenware jug of water by his side.

      He looked up and studied me again. ‘You may offer, sir, and I may refuse. The social contract countenances both actions!’

      ‘My action may be more mutually beneficial than yours.’

      Maybe my answer pleased him. He nodded, and I summoned the girl to bring another wine glass.

      My hesitant companion said, ‘May I drink to your health without necessarily wishing to listen to your conversation? You will think me discourteous, but perhaps I may excuse myself by explaining that it is the discourtesy of grief.’

      ‘I’m sorry to hear that. To hear that you have cause for grief, I mean. Some find distraction welcome at such times.’

      ‘Distraction? All my life I have been a man who scorned distraction! There’s work to be done in the world – so much to be found out—’ He checked himself abruptly, lifted his glass at me and took a sip from it.

      How good that wine tasted, if only because I secretly thought, what a rare old vintage I must be quaffing, laid down no doubt before the Battle of Trafalgar!

      I said, ‘I am older than you, sir (how easily that polite “sir” crept in as a mode of address!) – old enough to discover that finding out often leads to less pleasurable states of mind than mere ignorance!’

      At that he laughed curtly. ‘That I find an ignorant point of view. I perceive nevertheless that you are a man of culture, and a foreigner. Why do you stay in Sècheron and deny yourself the pleasures of Geneva?’

      ‘I like the simple life.’

      ‘I should be in Geneva now … I arrived there too late, after sunset, and found the gates of the city shut, confound it. Otherwise I’d be at my father’s house …’

      Again an abrupt halt to his speech. He frowned and stared down at the grain of the table. I longed to ask questions but was wary of revealing my complete СКАЧАТЬ