Before They Were Giants (45 page)

“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.”

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Michael Swanwick

 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 untruth 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.

“Ginungagap” appeared in a special science fiction issue of the literary journal
TriQuarterly,
guest-edited by David Hartwell. I hadn’t known it was a potential market, but my agent, Virginia Kidd, sent the story in. How I happened to have an agent and why she was handling short fiction are stories for another time.

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

I had just turned thirty and lost my job and gotten married and I was in the middle of a nine-month-long writer’s block. So seeing my first story in print was a greatly needed encouragement that I wasn’t entirely mad to think I could be a writer. Later, it and my second story, “The Feast of Saint Janis” both made it onto the Nebula ballot, which brought me a lot of attention, and that helped too.

Probably the best thing that happened, though, was that neither story won. I’ve known people who won major awards right off the bat, and it made every time they didn’t win one feel like another failure. I had the good fortune of getting on the ballot often, so that by the time I did actually win a Nebula many years later, I felt that I deserved it.

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

The process is still the same—I write as far into the story as I can and then go back to word one and rewrite from there. Eventually, the first page or so is as good as it’s going to get, so I start from the first iffy sentence. By the time I reach the end of a novel, every page has been rewritten at least ten and probably twenty times, but there’s no need to go back and do revisions because they’ve already been made. It’s a slow and laborious way to create fiction and I recommend it to no one. The only advantage it has is that it works for me, while methods that work for other writers do not.

Stylistically ... well, I don’t have a single style. Some stories are written very plainly and others are written as ornately as possible, depending on what they’re about. I simply write as best as I can. That hasn’t changed a bit.

What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

Write what you love to read rather than what you think you should write. Charles Stross introduced me to Martin Hauer, who’s writing an Edgar Rice Burroughs-esque novel about tanks versus magic swords, simply because that’s the sort of thing he likes. He’s got the right idea. He’s far more likely to be a success with that than if be wrote in slavish imitation of, say, Thomas Pynchon.

Also, keep your day job. Even if you’re lucky enough to be reliably productive, money you’re owed can be routinely delayed for a year or more.

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

I showed the opening section of the story to Gardner Dozois (this was before he became editor of
Asimov’s)
to get his advice. Later I saw him again and he asked how the story was going. “Great,” I said. “I just wrote a scene in which a cat hijacks a spaceship.”

“Oh, you did not!” he exclaimed.

But of course I had.

That was the only time I’ve ever been able to flat-out boggle Gardner with something I wrote. I’ve often tried to since, but never succeeded. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, like having your first story published.

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