Before They Were Giants (38 page)

"So?" she asked.

"The question is what you can do for us," he added. "Who you are."

Her eyes flashed, reflecting the night with mirrored venom. "I'm the forerunner. My people are coming and they need a vacant biosphere. Don't stand in our way!"

"I'm not," he remonstrated mildly; "I just want to know who you are. I'm not opposing you! But the boys probably will. And the Shogun might."

"Yes," she said. "But just what are these boys? And who is the Shogun?"

He raised an eyebrow. "That," he replied, "is something I expected you to know already."

~ * ~

The Hunter stared at the screen until the pain in her eyes forced her to blink furiously, tears trickling down her cheeks. It was hard to bear, this sense of her humanity being reduced to a cypher by isolation. The feeling that she'd been locked in her role for too long while the boys played their blood-games in the forest. Sometimes she sent out for a warm skull to scan for the wet sensations of dying; she couldn't remember her name but she felt that if she concentrated on it for long enough it would return ... she was close to an overload with time. It had been too many years since she had been merely human.
Damn, damn
, she whispered to herself in a monotonous litany;
why do I keep forgetting what it was like?
There was no answer; there never was.

All she knew was that she couldn't get a grip on her emotions. There'd been a time, not so long ago in historical terms, when she had possessed a blindingly important purpose for which she had sacrificed her freedom to be anyone but herself. The purpose might have been connected with the Shogun or the boys; it had faded into the cobwebs of neurones that died and were replaced by the longevity programs. To those who knew the signs she was as old as the artificial hills. She knew that it had meant everything to her once: but now it was merely the voice from behind her throne, and the boys.

~ * ~

Three short grey cylinders the size of mice drifted in free fall, jostling in the thin breeze along the axis of the world. One of them was capped at each end by a blue, very human eye. Another sprouted two surreal ears, perfect fleshy miniatures that merged seamlessly with the cylinder. The third had no discernable sense organs, but from a crack in its flank grew an almost perfect stem of convolvulus. The bindweed curled and twisted, loosely holding the other two cylinders in its green coils. A wasp coasted nearby, red-banded and bearing stenciled cyrillic insignia on its wings; five kilometers below, the cotton-wool swathes of cloud veiled the floor of the world. Valentin Zero had smuggled his cortex modules into the shogunate as seeds disguised in Nike's gut. Reaching the free-fall zone via the sewage system, the modules had matured and grown rapidly by preying on wind-born organisms; the wasp was one of many infiltrators sweeping the world for news.

As darkness fell, the twittering code-pulses from the videomice quietened down; Valentin tuned in on the steady, low-powered grumble of the neuroplants, the tok-tokking of a factory talking to its robots, the muffled crackling of poorly-shielded bionics hooked into the soil-support system. The microwave traffic was richer and more compressed than sonic communication, echoing back and forth along the eighty-kilometer cylinder. But Valentin was listening for a single delicate pulse-train; the side-band transmission from Nike's eyeballs.

This situation interested him, inasmuch as anything could hold his attention these days; the ins and outs of betrayal, of wheels within wheels and subordinates who were superiors. Valentin Zero was an expert system wired for espionage, and his current mission was to monitor Nike. She was so old as to be almost obsolete: old enough to have been here before. His sensorium ghosted through winds of data -- the life-blood of even the most seriously injured orbital republic -- until he finally locked onto a signal that looked right. It was faint, but the sophisticated coding matched his key; he locked on and submerged in the transmission, saw what Nike was seeing.

The wall of the house caved in soundlessly, blood spurting from severed arteries buried in the walls, followed by a soundless spasm as the floor shuddered and died. A release of sphincters flooded the food trough. A boy stepped through a great ragged rent in front of her; his left arm was coated to the elbow with a smooth sheen of gore, the chain-saw semi- retracted and murderous. His bronze exoskeleton exposed white skin and atrophied genitals, a wildly ecstatic smile of welcome beneath a cowlick of brown hair. The running lights on his spinal carapace were blinking green and violet pips, as membranes slid down across Nike's eyes and a targeting display flashed a red crosshair surrounded by flickering digits across his face.

"Hello," he said, and tittered. Ben sat where he was, very still, eyes narrowed; Nike felt her perception compress into a point on the boy's forehead, a point that could be made to explode.

"Hello," she replied. The boy frowned, as if disappointed.

"You're not scared," he complained, "and you're not dead. What are you?" He pouted with a transsexual sullenness that struck her as grotesquely old-fashioned.

I'm a visitor," she replied. "What are you?"

"I'm a Boy," he said, smiling suddenly; "I've come -- "

"He's come to negotiate their surrender," said Ben. The boy flared again, mercurially angry.

"You shut up, old man! That's for me to tell. It's not true, anyway."

Ben shut up, his face blank. Nike felt as if solid ground was dissolving beneath her feet. She'd pegged Ben as a non-participant, but this boy seemed to know something that she didn't.

"What have you got to tell me?" she asked, itching with unease.

"Merely to enquire after your health and your diplomatic patronage," said the boy, sniffing disdainfully. With a distinct lack of theatrical presence he sniffed and scratched under one armpit. "But the old man of the monolith's got to you already, I see!"

"The monolith?" she asked, tracking Ben with her peripheral vision. He sat as still as a rock.

"The castle ... the claw of the Shogun. We've been trying to get him to shut down the Hunter for decades, haven't we?" The boy glanced at Ben pointedly; Ben rocked slowly back and forth. The boy grimaced. "Observe the Shogun: theoretical ruler of the world, patron of the ongoing revolution, supreme systems authority of the dreamtime, etcetera. We've been trying to get him to do his job since he ran away fifty years ago."

"Why?" she asked, wondering to whom she should address the question.

"Because I'm not ready to let the boys do what they were designed to do," said Ben, not looking at her: "I'm not prepared to forcibly digitise the entire human biomass of the System to suit an ideological goal. When we designed the boys --"

"-- Who were 'we'?" she butted in, gripped by a sense of déjà vu.

He stared at her and yawned. "You just want to confirm this, don't you?" he said. "We were the Posthuman Front, the society for synthetic intelligence. The Islamic Corporate Shogunate was an experimental deployment for the revolution; fanatical cyborgs. Some of them were the wild boys and some of them were less obvious, like the hunters. They knew that when they died they'd be preserved in the dreamtime; their job was to forcibly integrate all reactionary elements. Very successful, I might add: most of the neuroplants in this world are part of the mind-support system. But it didn't work out too well." Ben paused, head bowed; the boy looked at him accusingly.

"The ecosystem was damaged during the revolution; it began to shut down," said the boy. "We stayed on in hope of finding transport to another world where we could integrate, but evidently there was a quarantine pact; all the exfiltrators lost contact. And then Ben reprogrammed that blasted Hunter -- the only surviving one, we exported all the other clones -- on our collective ass to keep us from getting enough slack ..." He shook his alloy-framed head. "Unless those early cadres succeeded, the revolution was an abortion. Any idea how many humans want what's on offer?" He snorted, disgustedly.

Nike looked at him enigmatically. "Yes," she said; "I have. I've seen it at first hand."

"Why are you here?" asked the boy. Nike shrugged.

"My people aren't very popular out there," she said. "We need some where to go; the Deconstructivists are pushing in everywhere, and we've lost ground so heavily that unless we find a closed habitat we'll be forced to condense in order to prevent mass defections."

"Deconstructivists?" said Ben. "What are they?"

"Human revenants. You honestly don't want to know," she said. It was so tiring, being on edge like this: even the wild boys didn't seem threatening enough to justify keeping her defenses on edge. "We just can't compete." A soft rain was falling outside, pattering through the hole in the wall.

"And who are you?" probed the boy, looking for completeness.

"Can't you guess?" she complained. "You've had it easy with your smug mind-games and your revolution in one habitat! Don't you see?" The wind ghosted through the house like the soul of history, ruffling her hair. "We tried to carry the revolution through outside the closed habitat, we fought for a century ..." She stared into reflective distances, eyes like dark mirrors, resembling her mind.

" ... but we lost."

~ * ~

The Hunter was wandering, adrift in an ocean of despair, when she came across Valentin Zero. Her video surfaces were locked into the sonic images of a fruit bat in free fall; when she saw something unusual she tensed instinctively. Could it be a boyish thing, here in the axial zone? A surge of conditioned reflexes drowned her nervous system in adrenalin and hatred; but as the bat approached the object it resolved into three components, all too small. Her skulls couldn't find a meaning for it. Drifting into a close approach, she noted three cylinders and a bushy twirl of vegetation. Modified axons in the bat's ears recognized vague high-frequency emissions, the fingerprint of molecular-scale processors; it had to be intelligent.

"
Hello unidentified structure
," she squeaked through the ultrasonic larynx of the bat. "Talk to me."

The structure began to rotate, sluggishly; the bat picked up another object, the vibrating flight surfaces of an insect. An eye swam into view, shielded by a triangular leaf. The bat screamed; something was scanning down its nervous system, trying to locate the hunter's interface.

"
Who are you?
" said the cluster of grey cylinders, words burning silent tracks of silvery pain through the mind of the bat. "
Visualize yourself
." The Hunter framed an image and transmitted it, waited as the intruder scanned it.

"
Nike
," broadcast Valentin; "
What are you doing here?
"

Then there was silence, as high above the castle the Hunter remembered who she had been.

~ * ~

Charles Stross

hen first approached, Charles Stross was reluctant to allow his freshman effort, to be included in
Before They Were Giants.
Yet there can be no question that he deserves to be here. Starting out his career as a freelance writer, during which time he invented several iconic monsters for Dungeons & Dragons (such as the death knight, the slaad, and the githyanki—a race surreptitiously borrowed from George R. R. Martin) and did extensive work as a technology journalist, in the last 10 years Stross has traded in such pursuits as well as day jobs as a computer programmer and certified pharmacist in favor of publishing no less than 20 critically acclaimed novels and short story collections. His work has received the Hugo Award, two Locus Awards, a Sidewise Award, and several others, along with a host of nominations, and he shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

While Stross himself may not see many connections between his early work and the newer books, devotees of his hard science fiction will no doubt notice one thread that binds them: a gonzo, no-holds-barred approach to SF, in which new ideas are a dime a dozen, and the sheer density of conjecture and cutting-edge concepts dare the reader to try and assimilate them all at once.

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