Before They Were Giants

by James L. Sutter

  "Hello," he said, and tittered. Ben sat where he was, very still, eyes narrowed; Nike felt her perception compress into a point on the boy's forehead, a point that could be made to explode.

  "Hello," she replied. The boy frowned, as if disappointed.

  "You're not scared," he complained, "and you're not dead. What are you?" He pouted with a transsexual sullenness that struck her as grotesquely old-fashioned.

  I'm a visitor," she replied. "What are you?"

  "I'm a Boy," he said, smiling suddenly; "I've come -- "

  "He's come to negotiate their surrender," said Ben. The boy flared again, mercurially angry.

  "You shut up, old man! That's for me to tell. It's not true, anyway."

  Ben shut up, his face blank. Nike felt as if solid ground was dissolving beneath her feet. She'd pegged Ben as a non-participant, but this boy seemed to know something that she didn't.

  "What have you got to tell me?" she asked, itching with unease.

  "Merely to enquire after your health and your diplomatic patronage," said the boy, sniffing disdainfully. With a distinct lack of theatrical presence he sniffed and scratched under one armpit. "But the old man of the monolith's got to you already, I see!"

  "The monolith?" she asked, tracking Ben with her peripheral vision. He sat as still as a rock.

  "The castle ... the claw of the Shogun. We've been trying to get him to shut down the Hunter for decades, haven't we?" The boy glanced at Ben pointedly; Ben rocked slowly back and forth. The boy grimaced. "Observe the Shogun: theoretical ruler of the world, patron of the ongoing revolution, supreme systems authority of the dreamtime, etcetera. We've been trying to get him to do his job since he ran away fifty years ago."

  "Why?" she asked, wondering to whom she should address the question.

  "Because I'm not ready to let the boys do what they were designed to do," said Ben, not looking at her: "I'm not prepared to forcibly digitise the entire human biomass of the System to suit an ideological goal. When we designed the boys --"

  "-- Who were 'we'?" she butted in, gripped by a sense of déjà vu.

  He stared at her and yawned. "You just want to confirm this, don't you?" he said. "We were the Posthuman Front, the society for synthetic intelligence. The Islamic Corporate Shogunate was an experimental deployment for the revolution; fanatical cyborgs. Some of them were the wild boys and some of them were less obvious, like the hunters. They knew that when they died they'd be preserved in the dreamtime; their job was to forcibly integrate all reactionary elements. Very successful, I might add: most of the neuroplants in this world are part of the mind-support system. But it didn't work out too well." Ben paused, head bowed; the boy looked at him accusingly.

  "The ecosystem was damaged during the revolution; it began to shut down," said the boy. "We stayed on in hope of finding transport to another world where we could integrate, but evidently there was a quarantine pact; all the exfiltrators lost contact. And then Ben reprogrammed that blasted Hunter -- the only surviving one, we exported all the other clones -- on our collective ass to keep us from getting enough slack ..." He shook his alloy-framed head. "Unless those early cadres succeeded, the revolution was an abortion. Any idea how many humans want what's on offer?" He snorted, disgustedly.

  Nike looked at him enigmatically. "Yes," she said; "I have. I've seen it at first hand."

  "Why are you here?" asked the boy. Nike shrugged.

  "My people aren't very popular out there," she said. "We need some where to go; the Deconstructivists are pushing in everywhere, and we've lost ground so heavily that unless we find a closed habitat we'll be forced to condense in order to prevent mass defections."

  "Deconstructivists?" said Ben. "What are they?"

  "Human revenants. You honestly don't want to know," she said. It was so tiring, being on edge like this: even the wild boys didn't seem threatening enough to justify keeping her defenses on edge. "We just can't compete." A soft rain was falling outside, pattering through the hole in the wall.

  "And who are you?" probed the boy, looking for completeness.

  "Can't you guess?" she complained. "You've had it easy with your smug mind-games and your revolution in one habitat! Don't you see?" The wind ghosted through the house like the soul of history, ruffling her hair. "We tried to carry the revolution through outside the closed habitat, we fought for a century ..." She stared into reflective distances, eyes like dark mirrors, resembling her mind.

  " ... but we lost."

  ~ * ~

  The Hunter was wandering, adrift in an ocean of despair, when she came across Valentin Zero. Her video surfaces were locked into the sonic images of a fruit bat in free fall; when she saw something unusual she tensed instinctively. Could it be a boyish thing, here in the axial zone? A surge of conditioned reflexes drowned her nervous system in adrenalin and hatred; but as the bat approached the object it resolved into three components, all too small. Her skulls couldn't find a meaning for it. Drifting into a close approach, she noted three cylinders and a bushy twirl of vegetation. Modified axons in the bat's ears recognized vague high-frequency emissions, the fingerprint of molecular-scale processors; it had to be intelligent.

  "Hello unidentified structure," she squeaked through the ultrasonic larynx of the bat. "Talk to me."

  The structure began to rotate, sluggishly; the bat picked up another object, the vibrating flight surfaces of an insect. An eye swam into view, shielded by a triangular leaf. The bat screamed; something was scanning down its nervous system, trying to locate the hunter's interface.

  "Who are you?" said the cluster of grey cylinders, words burning silent tracks of silvery pain through the mind of the bat. "Visualize yourself." The Hunter framed an image and transmitted it, waited as the intruder scanned it.

  "Nike," broadcast Valentin; "What are you doing here?"

  Then there was silence, as high above the castle the Hunter remembered who she had been.

  ~ * ~

  Charles Stross

  W

  hen first approached, Charles Stross was reluctant to allow his freshman effort, to be included in Before They Were Giants. Yet there can be no question that he deserves to be here. Starting out his career as a freelance writer, during which time he invented several iconic monsters for Dungeons & Dragons (such as the death knight, the slaad, and the githyanki—a race surreptitiously borrowed from George R. R. Martin) and did extensive work as a technology journalist, in the last 10 years Stross has traded in such pursuits as well as day jobs as a computer programmer and certified pharmacist in favor of publishing no less than 20 critically acclaimed novels and short story collections. His work has received the Hugo Award, two Locus Awards, a Sidewise Award, and several others, along with a host of nominations, and he shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

  While Stross himself may not see many connections between his early work and the newer books, devotees of his hard science fiction will no doubt notice one thread that binds them: a gonzo, no-holds-barred approach to SF, in which new ideas are a dime a dozen, and the sheer density of conjecture and cutting-edge concepts dare the reader to try and assimilate them all at once.

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

  Truth be told, I don’t even want to re-read the story. I wrote it off as juvenilia and a learning exercise years ago.

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

  I wouldn’t write a story like this today.

  Let me anatomize: it’s a simple conceptual one-shot (William Burroughs meets William Gibson). It’s poorly executed, the characterization doesn’t work terribly well, it’s overly influenced by what I was reading at the time (Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling), and doesn’t say anything really interesting or useful.

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

  I wrote it in 1985, aged 21, on my first word processor, la
rgely for the feel of the style. I was very much still learning the craft at the time, and I’d have done better to have left it in the small press/workshop zine I was frequenting at the time—this being pre-Internet, a lot of what happens on eritters.org today, writers learning their craft through workshops, took place on paper in workshop zines that were circulated to members for criticism—but instead I sent it to Interzone. And for some reason, Interzone’s editors liked it. (I think they were wrong, with an extra 23 years of perspective, but there’s no accounting for taste.)

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

  It was a huge morale boost; surely fame, fortune, and a multi-book contract were just around the corner!

  So I kept on writing and kept on submitting short stories. It only took me another 15 years to sell a novel.

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

  I think my writing has changed immensely—I’m not the same guy I was when I was less than half my current age! I’ve spent 13 of the past 18 years writing for a living, so I’m a lot more in control of my technique. I’ve had a lot more life experience, so I know a bit more about characterization. And I’m a lot more aware of what I’m doing at the level of narrative structure, plot, theme, and so on.

  More importantly, I shook off the initial cyberpunk infection (it bit hard, if you were in your late teens/early twenties in the 1980s) and began looking a bit more deeply at the society around me. SF tends to reflect our concerns about the present on the silver screen of the future; cyberpunk (with its designer labels, black leather and chrome, and large multinationals) was very much a movement rooted in the early 1980s. I don’t need a movement to hand me a cognitive map of my own near-future these days: I just need to go online and look around to see any number of really weird phenomena that are changing the way we live.

  What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

  Keep writing, keep finishing stories, send them out—and listen to what comes back.

  Try and fine-tune your bullshit detector so that you can tell the difference between useful criticisms and idiotic ones. (Most of the time people who criticize your work do so honestly, and you can learn a lot from them; but sometimes they’re just trying to fuck with your head for their own reasons.) Oh, and don’t pick fights with critics. That’s really important.

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

  Only this: Interzone published “The Boys,” and for some reason SF illustrator Pete Lyon was commissioned to do a cover painting for that issue, based on the story. Guess who bought the painting, a couple of years later? (Unfortunately the media he used degrade somewhat with UV exposure, so I don’t currently have it on display. But then again, it’s kind of creepy . . . like the original story.)

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Ginungagap

  by Michael Swanwick

  A

  BIGAIL CHECKED OUT OF MOTHER OF Mercy and rode the translator web to Toledo Cylinder in Juno Industrial Park. Stars bloomed, dwindled, disappeared five times. It was a long trek, halfway around the sun.

  Toledo was one of the older commercial cylinders, now given over almost entirely to bureaucrats, paper pushers, and free-lance professionals. It was not Abigail’s favorite place to visit, but she needed work and 3M had already bought out of her contract.

  The job broker had dyed his chest hairs blond and his leg hairs red. They clashed wildly with his green cache-sexe and turquoise jewelry. His fingers played on a keyout, bringing up an endless flow of career trivia. “Cute trick you played,” he said.

  Abigail flexed her new arm negligently. It was a good job, but pinker than the rest of her. And weak, of course, but exercise would correct that. “Thanks,” she said. She laid the arm underneath one breast and compared the colors. It matched the nipple perfectly. Definitely too pink. “Work outlook any good?”

  “Naw,” the broker said. A hummingbird flew past his ear, a nearly undetectable parting of the air. “I see here that you applied for the Proxima colony.”

  “They were full up,” Abigail said. “No openings for a gravity bum, hey?”

  “I didn’t say that,” the broker grumbled. “I’ll find—Hello! What’s this?” Abigail craned her neck, couldn’t get a clear look at the screen. “There’s a tag on your employment record.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Let me read.” A honeysuckle flower fell on Abigail’s hair and she brushed it off impatiently. The broker had an open-air office, framed by hedges and roofed over with a trellis. Sometimes Abigail found the older Belt cylinders a little too lavish for her taste.

  “Mmp.” The broker looked up. “Bell-Sandia wants to hire you. Indefinite term one-shot contract.” He swung the keyout around so she could see. “Very nice terms, but that’s normal for a high risk contract.”

  “High risk? From B-S, the Friendly Communications People? What kind of risk?”

  The broker scrolled up new material. “There.” He tapped the screen with a finger. “The language is involved, but what it boils down to is they’re looking for a test passenger for a device they’ve got that uses black holes for interstellar travel.”

  “Couldn’t work,” Abigail said. “The tidal forces—”

  “Spare me. Presumably they’ve found a way around that problem. The question is, are you interested or not?”

  Abigail stared up through the trellis at a stream meandering across the curved land overhead. Children were wading in it. She counted to a hundred very slowly, trying to look as if she needed to think it over.

  ~ * ~

  Abigail strapped herself into the translation harness and nodded to the technician outside the chamber. The tech touched her console and a light stasis field immobilized Abigail and the air about her while the chamber wall irised open. In a fluid bit of technological sleight of hand, the translator rechanneled her inertia and gifted her with a velocity almost, but not quite, that of the speed of light.

  Stars bloomed about her and the sun dwindled. She breathed in deeply and—was in the receiver device. Relativity had cheated her of all but a fraction of the transit time. She shrugged out of harness and frog-kicked her way to the lip station’s tug dock.

  The tug pilot grinned at her as she entered, then turned his attention to his controls. He was young and wore streaks of brown makeup across his chest and thighs—only slightly darker than his skin. His mesh vest was almost in bad taste, but he wore it well and looked roguish rather than overdressed. Abigail found herself wishing she had more than a cache-sexe and nail polish on—some jewelry or makeup, perhaps. She felt drab in comparison. The star-field wraparound held two inserts routed in by synchronous cameras. Alphanumerics flickered beneath them. One showed her immediate destination, the Bell-Sandia base Arthur C. Clarke. It consisted of five wheels, each set inside the other and rotating at slightly differing speeds. The base was done up in red-and-orange supergraphics. Considering its distance from the Belt factories, it was respectably sized.

  Abigail latched herself into the passenger seat as the engines cut in. The second insert—

  Ginungagap, the only known black hole in the sun’s gravity field, was discovered in 2023, a small voice murmured. Its presence explained the long-puzzling variations in the orbits of the outer planets. The Arthur C. Clarke was . . .

  “Is this necessary?” Abigail asked.

  “Absolutely,” the pilot said. “We abandoned the tourist program a year or so ago, but somehow the rules never caught up. They’re very strict about the regs here.” He winked at Abigail’s dismayed expression. “Hold tight a minute while—” His voice faded as he tinkered with the controls.

  . . . established forty years later and communications with the Proxima colony began shortly thereafter. Ginungagap . . .

  The voice cut off. She grinned thanks. “Abigail Vanderhoek.”

&n
bsp; “Cheyney,” the pilot said. “You’re the gravity bum, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I used to be a vacuum bum myself. But I got tired of it, and grabbed the first semipermanent contract that came along.”

  “I kind of went the other way.”

  “Probably what I should have done,” Cheyney said amiably. “Still, it’s a rough road. I picked up three scars along the way.” He pointed them out: a thick slash across his abdomen, a red splotch beside one nipple, and a white crescent half obscured by his scalp. “I could’ve had them cleaned up, but the way I figure, life is just a process of picking up scars and experience. So I kept ‘em.”

  If she had thought he was trying to impress her, Abigail would have slapped him down. But it was clearly just part of an ongoing self-dramatization, possibly justified, probably not. Abigail suspected that, tour trips to Earth excepted, the Clarke was as far down a gravity well as Cheyney had ever been. Still he did have an irresponsible, boyish appeal. “Take me past the net?” she asked.