Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (4 page)

Clive Folliot stared into the giant's face, appalled as much by the chilling familiarity of the monster's speech as by the terrible content of his words.

"I recognize you, Monster! I know who you are!"

"You have the advantage of me in that regard, insect! But I need not know your identity. It suffices that I recognize you as a Man, the spawn of Adam. It was one of your kind who created me, who then spurned me as a god would look upon his own creation and reject it! It was you who created for me a mate and then destroyed her before my own horrified eyes! You, or one such as you, for to me, now, all Mankind is as one. One evil and poisonous to all that is innocent and good, all that ever prayed and hoped for a single moment of innocence and joy and companionship!"

The monster drew a shuddering breath, but before Clive could respond, it resumed its tirade.

"I will crush you beneath my foot as you would crush an ant beneath your own! I will—"

"Wait, Monster!"

The words were spoken in the grating, metallic voice of Chang Guafe. "What of me? I am not a human; my land never built you. Do you plan to crush me, also? Do you think you can?"

Slowly the giant turned, casting his glare for the first time fully upon Chang Guafe. "You are the one who freed me from the ice, are you not?"

"I am, yes."

The monster stood, to Clive Folliot's eyes lost in contemplation. What heart pulsed in that gigantic breast, what brain worked within the monster's skull to comprehend this strangest of confrontations?

"You are not a Man, you strange thing."

"I am not."

Still the monster peered at Chang Guafe. "I have never before beheld such as you." He reached forward with a pale hand, the arm protruding far beyond the end of his ragged garment. "May I touch you, strange thing?"

How odd, Clive thought, that the monster asked permission of the cyborg before laying its clammy hand upon him!

"Touch me indeed," Chang Guafe grated.

The monster extended a death-white finger and touched Chang Guafe, first upon his metallic carapace, then upon a section of the living flesh that remained exposed.

"You are indeed peculiar. Are you even of this Creation?"

"Your meaning is not clear to me."

"I sense a strangeness in you," the monster replied. "A strangeness more total and profound than the strangeness of the octopus of the deep, the wolf of the northern wood, the flashing parrot of the tropical jungle, the python that falls upon its victim in the basin of the Amazon. I sense in you an alienness, strange thing, that leads me to the inference that you are not of this Earth."

"You are right, Monster. I am not of this Earth."

"There are other worlds, then, inhabited as this one?"

"More than you can count, Monster. More than you can imagine!"

"Then what do you here? And in the company of this Man, this most despicable of all God's creatures?"

"Clive Folliot is not so bad, Monster."

"He is a Man, and that is enough for me! I curse the day that God created Adam, and I curse each and every one of that first sinner's descendants!"

"They are not all so bad."

"You dare to make league with these foulers of the Earth?"

"I am not in partnership with all humankind. But I am in alliance with Clive Folliot and a few—just a few—of his fellows."

The monster swept his glare from Chang Guafe to Clive Folliot.

"I know you," Folliot asserted once more. "I have seen you upon the London stage—you, or an actor, at least, garbed and painted to resemble you."

The monster's face crinkled into a horrifying parody of a smile, and his booming voice gave out with a similarly dreadful version of laughter.

"I—upon the London stage? Am I a vaudevillian, a music-hall clown? Better should I declaim the lines of your Shakespeare. He, at least, was able to peer into the depths of the human heart and portray in his dramas the vices and the tragedies of your despicable breed."

"No, you were not an actor! It was the actors who portrayed you. Portrayed you in the dramatizations of the Widow Shelley's great novel."

The look upon the monster's face was not more sympathetic, but its expression shifted, at least, from one of cold malice to one of contemptuous bemusement. The monster looked at Clive as one would look at a bothersome mosquito in the moment before he crushed it out of existence.

"A novel? A literary romance devoted to me? A new
Robinson Crusoe
?"

"Yes."

"And the name of this fancy?"

"Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus!"

The monster's expression grew more pensive, its posture less threatening. "Frankenstein." Its voice fell in volume. Its tone was almost musing. "Henry Frankenstein was my creator."

"And your own name?"

"None gave me he. But I suppose he was my father, and. as you, Folliot—You say that is your name?"

Clive assented.

"As you received your name from your father, so I am entitled to receive my father's name from him. The modern Prometheus? No, Man, the name is one that I reject. Instead I shall take the name of my maker, my father, and my enemy. I shall be known to the generations of your kind by this name. My name will be one spoken with shuddering and fear. His name and mine, one and the same, shall echo down the corridors of time until it becomes a synonym for terror and destruction."

He drew himself up to his full height, his black-haired head nearly brushing the ice cave's frozen roof.

"I name myself—
Frankenstein
!"

As if the words had been a command issued by and to himself, the monster strode forward. For a moment Clive thought that he was about to be crushed beneath the massive boots of the mighty being, but instead the monster strode past him, past the cyborg Chang Guafe, and, ducking his head to avoid striking it against the ice, clumped from the cave.

Clive and Chang Guafe looked at each other.

"What think you, Being Clive?"

"I don't know, Chang Guafe. He hates me so. Perhaps you should accompany him. But this much I do know. At the end of the Widow Shelley's novel, the monster was left drifting upon a polar ice floe. This is the creature we have freed. We thus know where we are: upon the Earth! Don't you see, Chang Guafe? I entered the Dungeon from the surface of the Earth, and to the surface of the Earth I have returned! How close am I, now, to finding my brother Neville? Such was my original goal, and in the Dungeon I found him, yes, only to lose him again. What mad universe is this, with its clones and simulacra and illusions, its replicants and its imposters? How can one be assured of any truth?" He shook his head despairingly. "And yet, if this be Earth indeed, perhaps I may find Neville again, once and for all time. After all my travail, I feel at last that I may yet achieve the goal upon which I first set my purpose."

He thought for a moment. "But you, Chang Guafe—you are not of this Earth, nor was your mission the same as mine. Perhaps you will choose another path."

"I will not abandon you, Being Clive."

"Thank you, my friend. Thank you." Clive Folliot felt tears stinging his eyes. He wiped them away before they could freeze. "But will the monster accept me?"

"He recognizes in me an essence as alien to humankind as is his own. He seemed to accept me. I think I can » persuade him to accept you as well."

"I don't know."

"What is the alternative? Would you remain here until you perish of starvation or of sheer cold? If death is what you wish, Being Clive—that, either the monster or I could provide to you more quickly than the ice. You can be spared the suffering and despair of a slow death." Chang Guafe paused, then asked, "Is that your wish?"

With only the briefest of hesitations, Clive shook his head. "No, Chang Guafe. I have not come through all that I have—we have not endured all that we have together—to give up at this point. A voluntary death—whether at your hands or those of the monster, or in the slow, frigid embrace of the ice—would be abhorrent and cowardly. I must do my best, whether it brings me to triumph or defeat, life or death. I am an English gentleman and an officer of Her Majesty's Imperial Horse Guards. As long as I live and can struggle on, I will do so!"

Chang Guafe's head dipped and rose in his cyborg's equivalent of an assenting nod. "Come, then, Being Clive. We will do our best together!"

Chang Guafe scuttered through the opening, onto the ice floe outside the cave. As the opening of the cave was too narrow to accommodate both of them at once, Clive permitted the cyborg to precede him.

He halted, then, for a final glimpse around the cave. How long had the monster stood frozen in ice? His mind raced, trying to recapture all it had ever known of Frankenstein's monster. Mrs. Shelley had written her famous romance and published it many years before Clive's birth. By the time he was a growing boy on his father's, Baron Tewkesbury's, rural estates,
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
was a world-famed tale, printed in countless editions in England and abroad and performed in mime, drama, and even musical form on stages round about the globe.

Both Clive and his elder twin, Neville, had read the book as children, had seen it in several performances on visits to London, and had even been introduced once to the great Mrs. Shelley. The twins were mere stripling lads of fifteen at the time, and she a dignified widow within two years of her death. But even in that single encounter, the young Clive had been struck by the haunted expression in Mrs. Shelley's eyes and the distracted manner of her conversation.

It was as if there were more to
Frankenstein
than fantasy, than the supposed ghost story concocted by the young Mary Wollstonecraft. She was not yet Mrs. Shelley when she wrote the tale, and in truth was little older than the Folliot lads at the time of their meeting in 1849. Could this girl of nineteen truly create the wild tale, or had she received her data from some other source?

Clive shook himself back to the present. He would discuss this with his friend du Maurier if he ever had the opportunity to do so. But for now, he must deal with the mortal potentialities of the real world as it now confronted him. He strode from the cave and stood facing the alien cyborg and the monster.

"We must get off this ice floe," he volunteered.

"How, Being Clive?"

"I think I have a plan. We can walk to the end of the ice—at least, we can attempt that."

"And then?"

"Build a boat, and sail to land."

The monster glared at Clive. "An excellent plan, insect. And of what materials shall we build that boat? Know you of a forest where we can fell trees for timber?"

"I'm afraid not. But I remember a lesson in natural philosophy that I learned at Cambridge. We can build a boat of ice."

"Ice!" Chang Guafe's metallic grate and the monster's booming bass echoed in unison.

"Yes, ice! You can produce a heating filament similar to the one you used to thaw the monster from his frozen tomb, Chang Guafe?"

"Yes, I can do that."

"We can use it to scoop out a concave shell, and launch it from the edge of this ice floe."

"And as we sail to warmer climes and our ice shell melts, Man?" the monster questioned. "What then? Do we swim the rest of the way?"

"I'll admit that there's an element of risk," Clive conceded. "But there's a good chance that we'll drift to some northern island, or even to the mainland or Europe or Asia or the New World. Or we may encounter a sailing ship on the high seas. It's true that we'll be gambling our lives. But not to gamble them means to remain here and die."

"I was frozen here before. I can survive again," the monster boomed.

"Then that is your choice."

There was a pregnant pause. Then the monster said, "No, Folliot. I shall accompany you."

Clive nodded.

"I perceive upon your countenance an expression of skepticism," the monster resumed. "You wonder why I should accompany you, puny human bug, and your peculiar companion. But I tell you this: Even in extremis, when I sought oblivion in the eternal cold and silence of this distant realm, I was not left unmolested by Man. Man—the scourge of Creation! Man it was who created me, and lived to regret that deed—and Man it was who disturbed my rest. Thus do I vow by the very God in whose name your foul species has committed enormities uncounted from the dawn of your so-called civilization to this very cursed day, that Man shall regret once more the deed of awakening me from my frigid slumber."

The sky was no longer its featureless gray-white, nor the sea its unvarying green-black.

 

They had reached the edge of the ice floe after a march the length of which Clive Folliot could hardly estimate. Weak as he was, wracked by hunger and exposure to the elements, he felt that he could have lasted only a matter of hours, traveled at most a mile or two. But beneath the arctic sky, it seemed to him that he had trekked over an infinity of ice, counted an eternity of hours. He had no way of measuring the miles that they covered, and even his estimate of elapsed time was based on periods of activity and rest, waking and sleep. He was not sure what body of water they had reached, assuming that it was the Arctic Ocean. They might reach the northernmost edge of the great Eurasian land mass, or that of North America, or they might drift into the Atlantic, out of sight of land, and to their doom.

The sun seemed to describe a wobbling course around the horizon, neither rising to the zenith nor falling below the rim of distant ice fields, but instead maintaining a perpetual twilight, now marginally brighter, now almost imperceptibly dimmer, but never giving them the brightness of full daylight nor the full darkness of nightfall.

When they approached the edge, Clive could hear the gentle lapping of water against the ice. His stomach had shrunk by now from lack of food. Clean water was readily available—Chang Guafe was able to melt the ice to provide drinking water for any of the three of them. But there was no food.

Clive did not know the nourishment requirements of the metal-clad cyborg that scuttered and clicked over the face of the ice, nor those of the black-clad monster that plodded tirelessly beside the human and the cyborg. He did know that he was himself growing weaker by the day. How long he could survive on clear water was problematic.