Before They Were Giants (24 page)

“All right, that settled, will you please
go
and let me get back to my conversation.”

Curious in spite of himself, the captain asked, “Who are you conversing with? You don’t generally think with the other crew members.”

”My father has found a particularly humorous ninth-order differential equation; he is explaining it to me, and I would like to devote all of my energy to understanding.”

The captain shivered, not just from cold. Brohass’s father had been dead for thirty years. But half of him would live as long as Brohass lived; a quarter would live as long as Braxn, and so on down the line. It was unsettling to more mortal beings that a G’drellian maintained an autonomous existence, within his descendants, for tens of thousands of years after physical death. Whether a G’drellian would ever die completely was problematical. None yet had.

“This won’t take much of your time. I want you to locate Braxn and give him a message.”

”Why can’t you find him yourself?

“It’s a rather large planet, Brohass, and he’s thrown up a strong communication block.”

“We’re on a planet? Which one?”

The captain thought a long string of figures. “They call it ‘Earth.’”

“I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with it. Please open your mind and let me extract the relevant details.”

The captain did so, with chagrin. Brohass could easily have asked the computer, but his people were born voyeurs, and never would pass up a chance to probe another’s mind.

“Interesting, savage—I can see why he was drawn to it. Incidentally, your treatment of Llarvl was shameful. In his place,
you
would have lost control of my son just as quickly.

“And your knowledge, captain, of the people on this planet, is encyclopedic, but imperfect. You misunderstand both catechism and tautology, you used the expression
coup de grace
where
coup de theatre
would have been more fitting, and your Middle German would send a Middle German into convulsions. Furthermore, you
are
an ambulatory vegetable.

“To your credit, however, you were correct in assessing my son’s plans. He is now in possession of a minute of ‘time,’ as they say, on the planet’s communication network.

“Funny idea, that; beings possessing time rather than the other way around ...”

“Brohass!”

“Captain?”

“Aren’t you going to do anything?”

“Interfere with my child’s development?”

“He’s going to
kill
several billion entities!”

“Yes ... he probably is. Mammals, though. You have to admit they’d probably never make anything of themselves, anyhow.”

“Brohass! You’ve got to stop him!”

“I’m pulling your spindly leg, captain. I’ll talk to him. Just once, just once I would like to have a captain who could take a joke. You know, you vegetable people are unique in the civilized universe in your. . .”

“How much time do you have?”

“Oh, two thousand three hundred thirty-eight years, four days and . . .”

“No, no! How much time before Braxn gets on the air?”

“If Braxn got on the air, he would fall to the ground, even as you and I.”

The captain made a strangling noise.

“Oh, don’t bust a root. I have several seconds yet.” Brohass reverted to his native formlessness and sent a piercing tendril of thought through his son’s massive block.

“Braxn! This is your father. Will you slow down just a little bit?”

Braxn concentrated, and the bustling studio slowed down and froze into a tableau of suspended action. “Yes, Father. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Well, first, tell me what you’re doing in a television studio.”

“At the minute of maximum saturation, I’m going to broadcast the Vegan death-sign. That’s all.”

“That’s all. You’ll kill everybody.”

“Well, not everybody. Just those who are watching television. Oh, yes, and I’ve worked out a phonetic equivalent for simultaneous radio transmission. Get a few more that way, if it works.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can do it, son. But, Braxn, that’s what I wanted to think to you about.”

“You’re going to try to think me out of it.”

“Well, if you want to put it that way...”

“I bet that joke of captain put you up to it.”

“You know that that vegetable who walks like a man...”

“Hey; that’s a good one, Father. When’d you—”

“—neither he nor anyone else on this tin can could make me do anything that I...” Brohass sighed. “Look, Braxn. You’re poaching on a game preserve. Worse, shooting fish in a barrel. With a fission bomb, yet. How can you get any aesthetic satisfaction out of that?”

“Father, I know that quantity is no substitute for quality. But there are so
many
here!”

“—and you want to be poet laureate, right?” Brohass snorted mentally.

“There’s something wrong in that? This will be the biggest epic since Jkdir exterminated the . . .”

“Braxn, Braxn; my son—you’re temporizing. You know what’s wrong, don’t you? Surely you can feel it.”

Braxn fell silent as he tried to think of a convincing counterargument. He knew what was coming.

“The fact is that you are maturing rapidly. It’s time to put away your blocks—sure, you can go through with this trivial exercise. But you won’t be poet laureate. You’ll be dunce of the millennium, prize buffoon. You’re too old for this nonsense anymore; I know it, you know, and the whole race would know it eventually. You wouldn’t be able to show your mind anywhere in the civilized universe.”

He knew that his father was telling the truth. He had known for several days that he was ready for the next stage of development, but his judgment was blinded by the enormity of the canvas he had before him.

“Correct. The next stage awaits you, and I can assure you that it will be even more satisfying than the aesthetic. You have a nice planet here, and you might as well use it as the base of your operations. The captain is easily cowed—after I assure him that you no longer wish to, shall we say, immortalize these people in verse, he’ll be only too glad to move on without you. We’ll be back to pick you up in a century or so. Good-bye, son.”

“Good-bye, Father.”

The filament of the green light on the camera facing him was just starting to glow. He had something less than a hundredth of a second.

Extending his mental powers to the limit, he traced down every network and advertising executive who knew of the deal he had made. From the minds of hundreds of people he erased a million memories, substituting harmless ones. Two hundred pounds of gold disappeared back into thin air. Books were balanced.

Everyone in the studio had the same memory: Five minutes ago a police-escorted black limousine screeched to a halt out front, and this man, familiar face lined and pale with shock, stormed in with a covey of Secret Service men and commandeered the studio.

Braxn filled out his face and body with paunch. The man who owned this face died painlessly, as soon as Braxn had assimilated the contents of his brain. The body disappeared; his family and associates “remembered” that he was in New York for the week.

A finger of thought pushed into another man’s heart and stopped it. Convincing—he was overworked and overweight, anyhow. But to be on the safe side, Braxn adjusted his catabolism to make it look as if he had died ten minutes earlier. He manufactured appropriate cover stories.

All this accomplished, Braxn let time resume its original rate of flow.

The light winked green. A voice offstage said, “Ladies and gentlemen”— what else could one say—”the, uh, vice president of the United States.”

Braxn assumed a tragic and weary countenance. “It is my sad duty to inform the nation…”

Nine stages in the development of a G’drellian, from adolescence to voluntary termination.

The first stage is aesthetic, appreciation of an Art alien to any human, save a de Sade or a Hitler.

The second stage is power...

~ * ~

Joe Haldeman

oe Haldeman has a mixed relationship with writing advice, and for good reason—having sold the first two stories he ever wrote to
Galaxy
and
The Twilight Zone,
and his first novel to the first publisher he showed it to, Haldeman is living proof that sometimes you can succeed right out of the gate, with nothing more than raw talent and effort. Yet as a longstanding writing teacher everywhere from MIT to the prestigious Clarion writers’ workshops, Haldeman still does his best to teach the rest of us just what it is about his own writing that has brought him such success.

And success it is, by anyone’s standards. The science fiction classic
The Forever War,
published just three years after his mainstream debut novel
War Year,
won the Hugo, Nebula, and Ditmar awards, and is held up alongside Heinlein’s
Starship Troopers
by many fans as the best science fiction war novel of all time, drawing heavily on Haldeman’s own wartime experiences as a combat engineer in Vietnam. It sequel,
The Forever Peace,
won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell awards—the first such “triple crown” in more than two decades. Along the way, Haldeman’s authored more than thirty other books and graphic novels, picking up several more Hugos and Nebulas, multiple Rhyslings for SF poetry, a World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, making him one of the most respected and critically acclaimed writers in the genre.

Yet even the best have to start somewhere, and before the military service that would come to influence Haldeman’s most famous works, there was “Out of Phase,” in which a young author introduces us to the myriad and fascinating alien races inside his head...

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

I guess most of the humor holds up. And the horror. (It was written before I went to Vietnam, interestingly enough, though rewritten afterward.)

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

I couldn’t write this story today, because I’m not 23 years old anymore. If I were to write a similar story, it would be more tightly focused; there are a few pages where I obviously didn’t know where the story was going. But that doesn’t mean that I can go to those pages and fix them, because the flawed passages generated the rest of the story, for better or for worse. The actual rewrite of “Out of Phase” is the novel
Camouflage,
written some thirty years later.

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

The story was inspired by a writing class deadline. It started with a detailed description of a pool game, which I later cut, at editor Fred Pohl’s suggestion. It was initially published in
Galaxy
magazine.

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

I’d just gotten back from Vietnam. The army gave you 30 days’ “compassionate leave,” and one thing I did with the time was retype the two SF stories I’d written in my last semester in college, and send them out. (The other one, “I of Newton,” eventually wound up as an episode on
Twilight Zone.)
It sold in a couple of months, and I realized that writing would be an important part of my life, if not a significant source of income.