Before They Were Giants (39 page)

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, largely 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.)

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~ * ~

Ginungagap

by Michael Swanwick

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.”

“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.

Cheyney looped the tug around the communications net trailing the
Clarke.
Kilometers of steel lace passed beneath them. He pointed out a small dish antenna on the edge and a cluster of antennae on the back. “The loner on the edge transmits into Ginungagap,” he said. “The others relay information to and from Mother.”

“Mother?”

“That’s the traditional name for the
Arthur C. Clarke.”
He swung the tug about with a careless sweep of one arm, and launched into a long and scurrilous story about the origin of the nickname. Abigail laughed, and Cheyney pointed a finger. “There’s Ginungagap.”

Abigail peered intently. “Where? I don’t see a thing.” She glanced at the second wraparound insert, which displayed a magnified view of the black hole. It wasn’t at all impressive: a red smear against black nothingness. In the star-field it was all but invisible.

“Disappointing, hey? But still dangerous. Even this far out, there’s a lot of ionization from the accretion disk.”

“Is that why there’s a lip station?”

“Yeah. Particle concentration varies, but if the translator was right at the
Clarke,
we’d probably lose about a third of the passengers.”

Cheyney dropped Abigail off at Mother’s crew lock and looped the tug off and away. Abigail wondered where to go, what to do now.

“You’re the gravity bum we’re dumping down Ginungagap.” The short, solid man was upon her before she saw him. His eyes were intense. His
cache-sexe
was a conservative orange. “I liked the stunt with the arm. It takes a lot of guts to do something like that.” He pumped her arm. “I’m Paul Girard. Head of external security. In charge of your training. You play verbal Ping Pong?”

“Why do you ask?” she countered automatically.

“Don’t you know?”