Before They Were Giants

by James L. Sutter

  “Perhaps,” I replied. “When did you go before the computer to be licensed?”

  “Four months ago. There was a long line of people, many different complaints and ideas. Some were licensed; most weren’t. These fools who wish to exterminate a neighbor because he cracks his egg at the small end get nowhere with the computer, of course. It only accepts legitimate—and well worded—queries for licenses, of course.”

  “And you destroy synagogues, monasteries, and temples?”

  “Of course.”

  “But not the Buildings of the New Religion?”

  “No, I have no complaint against them.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He acknowledged with a smile and handshake. “When you get your article finished, send me a copy of the magazine. I would enjoy seeing what you write.”

  “Very well,” I replied. “If I sell it.”

  “Oh, no doubt you will, if you’re any writer at all. Many people are interested in church-destroyers these days.”

  I left the church- destroyer’s office and went downtown on my next mission. I thought deeply on what the c.d. had said, and came to many interesting conclusions. They were transferred to my notebook as soon as I grasped them.

  I entered the office of the communist-destroyer. In my notebook I made sure not to confuse him with the church-destroyer when I abbreviated. I put him down as cm.d.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked. He was a thin man with large eyes and nervous skin, with a face which can be described only as loose. He did not smile, but he did not frown, either.

  “You destroy communists?” I asked, pencil over notebook.

  “Yes. Every damn one of them. Why?” Did I detect a hint of a frown? No ... perhaps just a minor throat irritation. I prepared to switch on my shield, just in case.

  “I write,” I replied. “Articles, stories, books, and such.”

  “Oh. Be careful when you leave the building, my friend. There is a man down the street a ways who destroys writers.” His eyes flashed.

  “I am a government writer,” I said, and produced the small counterfeit card. “To continue. Why do you destroy communists?”

  “Because they wish to take us all over. They’re clever, too, and they could do it if it wasn’t for us.”

  “There is a group?”

  “Naturally. It isn’t too large, of course—” he lied, obviously—”but it’s enough to keep them from getting too strong all at once.”

  “How do you tell a communist?” I scribbled furiously.

  “Normally we get calls from people who report their neighbors or something. Then we check out the reports—there’s a stiff penalty in hitting normal people, of course—and move in if they’re valid. You’d be surprised how many false reports we get. Probably the communists do it themselves, give reports, I mean—just to get at us.” His face was red. He spoke in a tense voice. I readied one free finger over my shield switch.

  “Fine. Thank you very much, and success.”

  He smiled weakly and opened the door for me. “Careful of that writer-destroyer!” he warned and I shook my head.

  I took the monorails to Jayark-Mirie and noted with interest that two men shot each other on car 34-c. I wondered who they were even now, but nobody ever finds out unless one of the destroyers isn’t really a destroyer. If he’s a normal person, they raise quite a fuss.

  In Jayark, two men started battling it out on the streets and everybody automatically flipped on their shields. I believe only one man was killed that time, but I didn’t really notice.

  I interviewed the conservative-destroyer in his home.

  “You destroy conservatives?” I asked.

  “Yes, mm hmm. Conservatives, John Birchers, Nazis, and so on. You a writer?”

  I nodded. “Why?” I asked.

  “Why? Why what?”

  “Why do you destroy conservatives?”

  “Because they think they’re right and no one else is. I can’t stand that. It makes me sick.”

  “Why didn’t you become a church- destroyer, or a communist- destroyer, or somebody like that?”

  “I only have one choice of license and occupation, of course. I chose this one—don’t know really why. I just dislike old fogies with polluted brains functioning at half mast in reverence for the dear departed good old days.”

  “Thank you.”

  The last person I interviewed was the atheist-destroyer. He was an aged gentleman, dressed in a trim gray suit and carrying a fine cherry cane with gold tip. He had a sour face and a frown of the true avenger.

  “You kill atheists?”

  “I kill atheists.” He had a rough, grating voice sounding like gravel tinking on windows.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s God’s law. They hate all honest religioners, they do, and anyone who doesn’t think like them is nuts. In their opinion, of course. Bunch of twisted punks, all of them.” I thanked him and left the house. The monorail trip back to Brighton was quick and silent, giving me little time to organize my notes. I did that when I arrived at my hotel.

  I spent three hours re-wording and correcting and doing the final draft. Then I sent my report and query into the computer.

  I received my license today, along with the blank entrance form for purchasing a weapon.

  I’m licensed to destroy destroyers.

  ~ * ~

  Greg Bear

  S

  ince the 1970s, Greg Bear has been publishing short stories and novels that attempt to answer deep and abiding questions regarding both science and culture. Though occasionally branching into fantasy and horror, the hard science fiction for which he is best known has addressed everything from viral evolution to overpopulation and the Fermi paradox, and his short story (and later novel) “Blood Music” has been credited as the first appearance of nanotechnology in science fiction. Along the way, he’s picked up three Hugo Awards, a John W. Campbell Award, a Robert A. Heinlein Award, and a whopping five Nebula Awards—one of only two authors ever to win a Nebula in every category. The scientific rigor within many of his stories has been praised by the prestigious research journal Nature, and that same devotion to cutting-edge fact and plausible extrapolation has led him to serve on political and scientific action committees and advisory boards for everyone from Microsoft to the U.S. Army, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security.

  Though his short stories began appearing regularly in major science fiction venues three decades ago—and his artwork several years before that—Bear’s little-known first step into the field saw print several years prior, while the author himself was still in high school.

  Looking back, what do you think still works well in this story? Why?

  The shorter a story is, the more difficult it is to write—but for me, as a youngster, this one was remarkably easy. Even at the age of fifteen, the culture of intolerance and bigotry of the mid-sixties had affected me strongly, and the story even today packs a bit of that old punch.

  If you were writing this today, what would you do differently? What are the story’s weaknesses, and how would you change them?

  I’d probably just rewrite it, which would likely make it twice as long.

  What inspired this story? How did it take shape? Where was it initially published?

  I wrote it in 1966—so long ago I don’t remember the specific circumstances. Around that time, I was visiting Los Angeles with my cousin Dan Garrett and dropping by Forry Ackerman’s house to chat and see his collection. Forry suggested I try sending stories to Robert Lowndes, who was editing a number of magazines—very low-budget, small saddle-staple productions for Health Knowledge Publications, including The Magazine of Horror and Famous Science Fiction. I thought the logo for The Magazine of Horror was a little too gruesome—I was quite the style worry-wart back in those days—and drew up a scratchboard sample of an alternate cover, which Lowndes graciously thanked me for, but said that the logo’s original dripping blood no doubt helped sales. I th
en submitted “Destroyers” to him, and to my shock, almost immediately he accepted it. It was published in 1967, and I was paid 10 dollars—and somewhere, I still have a copy of that check. I fondly remember dropping by Readerama in Grossmont Center in San Diego to buy copies of my first publication—with high school buddies in tow. Stephen King, incidentally, published his first story in The Magazine of Horror.

  Where were you in your life when you published this piece, and what kind of impact did it have?

  I was a kid. I had been submitting stories to magazines for three years at that point—and the sale knocked me for a loop. It also impressed my parents. I don’t remember lording it over my high school English teachers, but I’m sure that was at the back of my thoughts! However, I wouldn’t sell another story for four years, so that balanced things out.

  How has your writing changed over the years, both stylistically and in terms of your writing process?

  It’s gotten a little better.

  What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

  Keep writing! Don’t get hung up on one story or one book. A career is rarely made by one achievement.

  Any anecdotes regarding the story or your experiences as a fledgling writer?

  I could try to imagine my teachers dealing with a student who had already professionally published a story, but who refused to do the assigned homework—how do you get through to such a character?

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Out of Phase

  by Joe Haldeman

  T

  rapped. From the waterfront bar to a crap game to a simpleminded ambush in a dead-end alley.

  He didn’t blame them for being angry. His pockets were stuffed with their money, greasy crumpled fives and tens. Two thousand and twenty of their hard-earned dollars, if his memory served him right. And of course it did.

  They had supplied three sets of dice—two loaded, one shaved. All three were childishly easy to manipulate. He let them win each throw at first, and then less and less often. Finally, he tested their credulity and emptied their pockets, with ten sevens in a row.

  That much had been easy. But now he was in a difficult position. Under the transparent pretext of finding a bigger game, the leader of the gang had steered him into this blind alley, where five others were hiding in ambush.

  And now the six were joined in a line, advancing on him, pushing him toward the tall Hurricane fence that blocked the end of the alley.

  Jeff started pacing them, walking backwards. Thirty seconds, give or take a little, before he would back into the fence and be caught. Thirty seconds objective...

  Jeff froze and did a little trick with his brain. All the energy his strange body produced, except for that fraction needed to maintain human form, was channeled into heightening his sensory perceptions, accelerating his mental processes. He had to find a way out of this dilemma, without exposing his true nature.

  The murderous sextet slowed down in Jeff’s frozen eyes as the ratio of subjective to objective time flux increased arithmetically, geometrically, exponentially.

  A drop of sweat rolled from the leader’s brow, fell two feet in a fraction of a second, a foot in the next second, an inch in the next, a millimeter, a micron...

  Now.

  ~ * ~

  A pity he couldn’t just kill them all, slowly, painfully. Terrible to have artistic responsibility stifled by practical obligations. Such a beautiful composition.

  They were frozen in attitudes ranging from the leader’s leering, sadistic anticipation of pleasure (dilettante!), to the little one’s ill-concealed fear of pain, of inflicting pain, to Jimmy’s unthinking, color-blinded compulsion to take apart, destroy... ah, Jimmy, slave of entropy, servant of disorder and chaos, I will make of you an epic, a saga.

  I would, that is. I could.

  But Llarvl said...

  That snail. Insensitive brute.

  Next time out I’ll get a supervisor who can understand.

  But next time out, I’ll be too old.

  Even now I can feel it.

  Damn that snail!

  ~ * ~

  The ship hovered above a South American plantation. People looked at it and saw only the sky beyond. Radar would never detect it. Only a voodoo priest, in a mushroom trance, felt its presence. He tried to verbalize and died of a cerebral occlusion.

  Too quick. Artless.

  Llarvl was talking to him. “Bluntly, I wish we didn’t have to use you, Braxn.” His crude race communicated vocally, and the unmodulated, in-and-out-of-phase thought waves washed a gravelly ebb and flow of pain through Braxn’s organ of communication. He stored the pain, low intensity that it was, for contemplation at a more satisfactory time.

  He repeated: “If only we had brought someone else of your sort, besides your father, of course. Shape-changers are not such a rarity.” He plucked out a cilium in frustration, but of course felt no pain. Braxn was too close; sucked it in.

  “A G’drellian poet. A poet of pain. Of all the useless baggage to drag around on a survey expedition . . .” He sighed and ground his shell against the wall. “But we have no choice. Only two bipeds aboard the ship, and neither of them is even remotely mammalian. And the natives of this planet are acutely xenophobic. Hell, they’re omniphobic. Even harder to take than you, worthy poet.

  “But this is the biggest find of the whole trip! The crucial period of transition—they may be on the brink of civilization; still animals, but rapidly advancing. Think of it! In ten or twenty generations they’ll be human, and seek us, as most do. We’ve met thousands of civilized races, more thousands of savage ones; but this is the first we’ve found in transition. Ethnology, alien psychology, everything”—he shuddered—”even your people’s excuse for art, will benefit immeasurably.”

  Braxn made no comment. He hadn’t bothered to form a speech organ for the interview. He knew Llarvl would do all the talking anyway.

  But he had been studying, under stasis, for several hours. Knowing exactly what needed to be done, he let half his body disintegrate into its component parts and started to remold them.

  First the skeleton, bone by thousandth bone; the internal organs, in logical order, glistening, throbbing, functioning; wet-red muscle, fat, connective tissue, derma, epidermis; smooth and olive, fingernails, hair, small mole on the left cheek.

  Vocal cords, virgin, throb contralto: “Mammalian enough?”

  “Speak Galactic!”

  “I said, ‘Mammalian enough?’ I mean, would you like them bigger,” she demonstrated, “or smaller?”

  “How would I know?” snapped Llarvl, trying to hide his disgust. “Pick some sort of statistical mean.”

  Braxn picked a statistical mean between the October and November Playmate of the Month.

  With what he thought was detached objectivity, Llarvl said, “Ugly bunch of creatures, aren’t they?” About one hundred million years ago, Llarvl’s race had one natural enemy—a race of biped mammals.

  With a silvery laugh, Braxn left to prepare for planetfall.

  Braxn had studied the Earth and its people for some ten thousand hours, subjective time. She knew about clothes, she knew about sex, she knew about rape.

  So she appeared on Earth, on a dirt road in South America, without a stitch. Without a blush. And her scholastic observations were confirmed, in the field, so to speak, in less than five minutes. She learned quite a bit the first time; less the second. The third time, well, she was merely bored.

  She made him into a beautiful. . . poem?

  She made him into a mouse-sized, shriveled brown husk, lying dead by the side of the road, his tiny features contorted with incredible agony.

  She synthesized clothes, grey and dirty, and changed herself into an old, crippled hag. It was twenty minutes before she met another man, who . . .

  Another dry husk.

  Braxn was getting an interesting, if low, opinion of men, Bolivian farmers in particular; so she changed herself into one. The shoe on the oth
er foot, she found, made things different, but not necessarily better. Well, she was gathering material. That’s what Llarvl wanted.

  She waited for a car to come by, reverted to the original voluptuous pattern, disposed of the driver when he stopped to investigate, took his form and his car, and started on her world tour.