Before They Were Giants (44 page)

“Mmmm?”

“Don’t go.”

She wanted to cry. Because as soon as he said it, she knew it was another test, the final one. And she also knew that Paul wanted her to fail it. That he honestly believed transversing Ginungagap would kill her, and that the woman who emerged from the spiders’ black hole would not be herself.

His eyes were shut; she could tell by the creases in his forehead. He knew what her answer was. There was no way he could avoid knowing.

Abigail sensed that this was as close to a declaration of emotion as Paul was capable of. She felt how he despised himself for using his real emotions as yet another test, and how he could not even pretend to himself that there were circumstances under which he would
not
so test her.
This must be how it feels to think as he does,
she thought.
To constantly scrabble after every last implication, like eternally picking at a scab.

 
“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.”