“Oh, Paul,” she said.
He wrenched about, turning his back to her. “Sometimes I wish”—his hands rose in front of his face like claws; they moved toward his eyes, closed into fists— “that for just ten goddamned minutes I could turn my mind off.” His voice was bitter.
Abigail huddled against him, looped a hand over his side and onto his chest. “Hush,” she said.
~ * ~
The tug backed away from Clotho, dwindling until it was one of a ring of bright sparks pacing the platform. Mother was a point source lost in the star field. Abigail shivered, pulled off her arm bands and shoved them into a storage sack. She reached for her cache-sexe, hesitated.
The hell with it, she thought. It’s nothing they haven’t seen before. She shucked it off, stood naked. Gooseflesh rose on the backs of her legs. She swam to the transmittal device, feeling awkward under the distant watching eyes.
Abigail groped into the clamshell. “Go,” she said.
The metal closed about her seamlessly, encasing her in darkness. She floated in a lotus position, bobbing slightly.
A light, gripping field touched her, stilling her motion. On cue, hypnotic commands took hold in her brain. Her breathing became shallow; her heart slowed. She felt her body ease into stasis. The final command took hold.
Abigail weighed 50 keys. Even though the water in her body would not be transmitted, the polymer chain she was to be transformed into would be 275 kilometers long. It would take 15 minutes, and 17 seconds to unravel at light speed, negligibly longer at translation speed. She would still be sitting in Clotho when the spiders began knitting her up.
It was possible that Garble had gone mad from a relatively swift transit. Paul doubted it, but he wasn’t taking any chances. To protect Abigail’s sanity, the meds had wet-wired a travel fantasy into her brain. It would blind her to external reality while she traveled.
~ * ~
She was an eagle. Great feathered wings extended out from her shoulders. Clotho was gone, leaving her alone in space. Her skin was red and leathery, her breasts hard and unyielding. Feathers covered her thighs, giving way at the knees to talons.
She moved her wings, bouncing lightly against the thin solar wind swirling down into Ginungagap. The vacuum felt like absolute freedom. She screamed a predator’s exultant shrill. Nothing enclosed her; she was free of restrictions forever.
Below her lay Ginungagap, the primal chasm, an invisible challenge marked by a red smudge of glowing gases. It was inchoate madness, a gibbering, impersonal force that wanted to draw her in, to crush her in its embrace. Its hunger was fierce and insatiable.
Abigail held her place briefly, effortlessly. Then she folded her wings and dove.
A rain of X rays stung through her, the scattering of Ginungagap’s accretion disk. They were molten iron passing through a ghost. Shrieking defiance, she attacked, scattering sparks in her wake.
Ginungagap grew, swelled until it swallowed up her vision. It was purest black, unseeable, unknowable, a thing of madness. It was Enemy.
A distant objective part of her knew that she was still in Clotho, the polymer chain being unraveled from her body, accelerated by a translator, passing through two black holes, and simultaneously being knit up by the spiders. It didn’t matter.
She plunged into Ginungagap as effortlessly as if it were the film of a soap bubble.
In—
—And out.
It was like being reversed in a mirror, or watching an entertainment run backward. She was instantly flying out the way she came. The sky was a mottled mass of violet light.
The stars before her brightened from violet to blue, She craned her neck, looked back at Ginungagap, saw its disk-shaped nothingness recede, and screamed in frustration because it had escaped her. She spread her wings to slow her flight and—
—was sitting in a dark place. Her hand reached out, touched metal, recognized the inside of a clamshell device.
A hairline crack of light looped over her, widened. The clamshell opened.
Oceans of color bathed her face. Abigail straightened, and the act of doing so lifted her up gently. She stared through the transparent bubble at a phosphorescent foreverness of light.
My God, she thought. The stars.
The stars were thicker, more numerous than she was used to seeing them—large and bright and glittery rich. She was probably someplace significant, in a star cluster or the center of the galaxy; she couldn’t guess. She felt irrationally happy to simply be; she took a deep breath, then laughed.
“Abigail Vanderhoek.”
She turned to face the voice, and found that it came from a machine. Spiders crouched beside it, legs moving silently. Outside, in the hard vacuum, were more spiders.
“We regret any pain this may cause,” the machine said.
Then the spiders rushed forward. She had no time to react. Sharp mandibles loomed before her, then dipped to her neck. Impossibly swift, they sliced through her throat, severed her spine. A sudden jerk and her head was separated from her body.
It happened in an instant. She felt brief pain, and the dissociation of actually seeing her decapitated body just beginning to react. And then she died.
~ * ~
A spark. A light. I’m alive, she thought. Consciousness returned like an ancient cathode tube warming up. Abigail stretched slowly, bobbing gently in the air, collecting her thoughts. She was in the sister-Clotho again—not in pain, her head and neck firmly on her shoulders. There were spiders in the platform, and a few floating outside.
“Abigail Vanderhoek,” the machine said. “We are ready to begin negotiations.”
Abigail said nothing.
After a moment, the machine said, “Are you damaged? Are your thoughts impaired?” A pause, then, “Was your mind not protected during transit?”
“Is that you waving the legs there? Outside the platform?”
“Yes. It is important that you talk with the other humans. You must convey our questions. They will not communicate with us.”
“I have a few questions of my own,” Abigail said. “I won’t cooperate until you answer them.”
“We will answer any questions provided you neither garble nor garble.”
“What do you take me for?” Abigail asked. “Of course I won’t.”
Long hours later she spoke to Paul and Dominguez. At her request the spiders had withdrawn, leaving her alone. Dominguez looked drawn and haggard. “I swear we had no idea the spiders would attack you,” Dominguez said. “We saw it on the screens. I was certain you’d been killed....” His voice trailed off.
“Well, I’m alive, no thanks to you guys. Just what is this crap about an explosive substance in my bones, anyway?”
“An explosive—I swear we know nothing of anything of the kind.”
“A close relative to plastique,” Paul said. “I had a small editing device attached to Clotho’s translator. It altered roughly half the bone marrow in your sternum, pelvis, and femurs in transmission. I’d hoped the spiders wouldn’t pick up on it so quickly.”
“You actually did,” Abigail marveled. “The spiders weren’t lying; they decapitated me in self-defense. What the holy hell did you think you were doing?”
“Just a precaution,” Paul said. “We wet-wired you to trigger the stuff on command. That way, we could have taken out the spider installation if they’d tried something funny.”
“Um,” Dominguez said, “this is being recorded. What I’d like to know, Ms. Vanderhoek, is how you escaped being destroyed.”
“I didn’t,” Abigail said. “The spiders killed me. Fortunately, they anticipated the situation, and recorded the transmission. It was easy for them to recreate me—after they edited out the plastique.”
Dominguez gave her a odd look. “You don’t—feel anything particular about this?”
“Like what?”
“Well—” He turned to Paul helplessly.
“Like the real Abigail Vanderhoek died and you’re simply
a very realistic copy,” Paul said.
“Look, we’ve been through this garbage before,” Abigail began angrily.
Paul smiled formally at Dominguez. It was hard to adjust to seeing the two in flat black-and-white. “She doesn’t believe a word of it.”
“If you guys can pull yourselves up out of your navels for a minute,” Abigail said, “I’ve got a line on something the spiders have that you want. They claim they’ve sent probes through their black hole.”
“Probes?” Paul stiffened. Abigail could sense the thoughts coursing through his skull, of defenses and military applications.
“Carbon-hydrogen chain probes. Organic probes. Self-constructing transmitters. They’ve got a carbon-based secondary technology.”
“Nonsense,” Dominguez said. “How could they convert back to coherent matter with a receiver?”
Abigail shrugged. “They claim to have found a loophole.”
“How does it work?” Paul snapped.
“They wouldn’t say. They seemed to think you’d pay well for it.”
“That’s very true,” Paul said slowly. “Oh, yes.”
The conference took almost as long as her session with the spiders had. Abigail was bone weary when Dominguez finally said, “That ties up the official minutes. We now stop recording.” A line tracked across the screen, was gone. “If you want to speak to anyone off the record, now’s your chance. Perhaps there is someone close to you...”
“Close? No.” Abigail almost laughed. “I’ll speak to Paul alone, though.”
A spider floated by outside Clotho II. It was a golden, crablike being, its body slightly opalescent. It skittered along unseen threads strung between the open platforms of the spider star-city. “I’m listening,” Paul said.
“You turned me into a bomb, you freak.”
“So?”
“I could have been killed.”
“Am I supposed to care?”
“You damn well ought to, considering the liberties you’ve taken with my fair white body.”
“Let’s get one thing understood,” Paul said. “The woman I slept with, the woman I cared for, is dead. I have no feelings toward or obligations to you whatsoever.”
“Paul,” Abigail said. “I’m not dead. Believe me, I’d know if I were.”
“How could I possibly trust what you think or feel? It could all be attitudes the spiders wet-wired into you. We know they have the technology.”
“How do you know that your attitudes aren’t wet-wired in? For that matter, how do you know anything is real? I mean, these are the most sophomoric philosophic ideas there are. But I’m the same woman I was a few hours ago. My memories, opinions, feelings—they’re all the same as they were. There’s absolutely no difference between me and the woman you slept with on the Clarke.”
“I know.” Paul’s eyes were cold. “That’s the horror of it.” He snapped off the screen.
Abigail found herself staring at the lifeless machinery. God, that hurt, she thought. It shouldn’t, but it hurt. She went to her quarters.
The spiders had done a respectable job of preparing for her. There were no green plants, but otherwise the room was the same as the one she’d had on the Clarke. They’d even been able to spin the platform, giving her an adequate down-orientation. She sat in her hammock, determined to think pleasanter thoughts. About the offer the spiders had made, for example. The one she hadn’t told Paul and Dominguez about.
Banned by their chemistry from using black holes to travel, the spiders needed a representative to see to their interests among the stars. They had offered her the job. Or perhaps the plural would be more appropriate— they had offered her the jobs. Because there were too many places to go for one woman to handle them all. They needed a dozen—in time, perhaps, a hundred— Abigail Vanderhoeks.
In exchange for licensing rights to her personality, the right to make as many duplicates of her as were needed, they were willing to give her the rights to the self-reconstructing black hole platforms.
It would make her a rich woman—a hundred rich women—back in human space. And it would open the universe. She hadn’t committed herself yet, but there was no way she was going to turn down the offer. The chance to see a thousand stars? No, she would not pass it by.
When she got old, too, they could create another Abigail from their recording, burn her new memories into it, and destroy her old body.
I’m going to see the stars, she thought. I’m going to live forever. She couldn’t understand why she didn’t feel elated, wondered at the sudden rush of melancholy that ran through her like the precursor of tears.
Garble jumped into her lap, offered his belly to be scratched. The spiders had recorded him, too. They had been glad to restore him to his unaltered state when she made the request. She stroked his stomach and buried her face in his fur.
“Pretty little cat,” she told him. “I thought you were dead.”
~ * ~
Michael Swanwick
A
master of the short story form, Michael Swanwick is an oddity in the novel-driven world of modern science-fiction and fantasy, with his numerous short story collections rivaling his novels for shelf space and proving that there’s still an audience hungry for such things—at least, if you’re as good as Michael Swanwick. With four Hugo Awards, a World Fantasy Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for his short stories, plus a Nebula for his 1991 novel Stations of the Tide, Swanwick has made his mark and gathered all the pedigrees he needs to keep his legions of fans following his every word.
And let it never be said that he doesn’t take them for a ride. From the twisted fantasy of The Iron Dragon’s Daughter and The Dragons of Babel, in which dragons act as fighter jets and business-suited elves bet on dwarven knife-fights in their highrise towers, to the time travel and dinosaurs of Bones of the Earth, Swanwick spins out world after unique world with the boundless energy and innovation only he can provide. In “Ginungagap,” Swanwick blends all of his characteristic charms—big-ticket scientific ideas, strange races, morally dubious characters, and a healthy dose of absurdity—into one of the most impressive debut stories in the genre.
Looking back, what do you think still works well in this story? Why?
The theme and ending still work, because they address a philosophical question that can probably never be resolved. Also, there’s a youthful energy in “Ginungagap” which came from my throwing in every idea and inventive detail I could make fit.
This latter is a technique that still suits me well. New writers are sometimes stingy with their ideas, in the belief that they’re a non-renewable resource. Not so. The more ideas you use, the more that rise up to fill the vacancy they leave behind. Plus, it’s pointless to hoard ideas—as they age, they grow stale. Best to use them while they’re fresh.
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 ditch those damned “keyouts.” Personal computers were brand new at the time and all of us who were working in the extrapolative end of SF could see they were going to be ubiquitous, so for a season they were everywhere in our fiction. Worse, there was no agreed-upon name for them, so I had to make one up. And worst of all, the name I came up with was lame. Having failed to come up with something cool, I should have sidestepped the issue altogether.
Nowadays, I think I’d just have the characters ask questions and let voices out of thin air answer them. I wouldn’t explain a thing.
What inspired this story? How did it take shape? Where was it initially published?
The story was triggered by a long conversation with a physics Ph.D. candidate about his mentor’s speculations on the nature of black holes and by—this is embarrassing—a Star Trek novelization in which Dr. McCoy has a running argument that the transporter beam actually kills the person who goes into it and creates a new person with the original’s memories. I was fascinated by the fact that the truth or untru
th of the proposition was not only impervious to proof but passionately held by whomever I discussed it with. So I put the two together in order to create a thought experiment which I hoped would clarify my thinking on the matter.
Originally the protagonist was male. But then I realized that this was why the story wasn’t moving forward—I was identifying too strongly with him. Why did he behave as he did? He was a space hero! Where did he come from? Schenectady, New York. Which didn’t make for a very convincing character. So I switched genders and, because all the women I’ve known always had good and sufficient reasons for their actions, Abigail came to life.
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