“What the hell?” said Stefan, rubbing his bruised shoulder.
Lying in the cave was Jayson’s motorcycle—a bit chewed and bent, but still functional. Next to it were the half-digested pieces of Stefan’s laptop, a few scraps of Hyperio’s map, and even the debris of that Tongvan canoe they’d just been riding.
“So the goddamned ants know all about us, huh?” said Jayson, rubbing his sore ribcage. “God, I hate them.”
“A single ant doesn’t know squat,” said Stefan. “Ants are like individual neurons. But, yeah, there’s some kind of emergent hive mind happening. Like a brain. Like an ultracluster computer. The hive sensed the cosmic harmony emanating from my house. Ants are natural-born collectors; once they got interested in us, they had to gather all the Stefan and Jayson artifacts into one spot.”
“They ruined the paint on my motorcycle, man,” fumed Jayson, not really listening.
A dog-sized yellow ant trotted up and regurgitated—a few hundred elderly cellphones.
“What is
that
?” cried Stefan, not wanting to believe what he saw.
“Your homemade supercomputer,” said Jayson, shaking his head. “My website.”
“My baskets of cell phones?” cried Stefan.. “They’re lugging all my phones here?” Stefan picked up a phone and opened it. The phone’s components were quite dead; munged by ant jaws and eaten away by stomach acids. Another yellow ant approached and burped up more phones. Perhaps a hundred more yellow ants were following in her wake.
A bit disconsolately, the boys wandered the shore of the giant lake. The edges were treacherous. Thin sheens of water glistened atop a viscous, sticky, string-based equivalent of tar. The string tar had claimed some victims, unfortunate beasts who couldn’t take the irregular sudden transitions of scale, their bodies warping like balloon animals, their overloaded tiny hearts bursting from the effort of pumping blood to heads swollen to the size of refrigerators. Tigers and wolves had feasted upon the dying creatures, and had fallen captive to the string-tar themselves. Flies and condors darted and zoomed above the deadly tar pools, their proportions changing in mid-flight. The pools stank of carrion.
It was sickening to even try and imagine how fast the world’s time was flowing relative to this forgotten place.
“My Calabi-Yau search program is lost to mankind,” mourned Stefan. “How will they ever learn the One True String Theory?”
“Maybe you whiffed on mankind,” said Jayson. “But I’d say you went over very big with the ants.”
“That’s true,” said Stefan, brightening just a bit. “And you know what—I bet the ants are in fact using my discovery to weave the world.
Our
discovery. They learned from touching your chain mail, too, Jayson. Twine dimension seven. Loop dimension eight.” Stefan was talking louder, puffing himself up. “The ants built our universe, yes, but we showed them how! It’s a closed causal loop. We’re the lords of creation.”
“If you’re God, how come we’re so screwed?” said Jayson. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”
Huge, tanker-like ants were skittering across the mirrored lake in a regular rhythm. The big ants were regurgitating food near the pit’s wheeling, starry center, then scurrying across the great gleaming lake to mount the inconceivably tall canyon walls, presumably to forage for food in the outer world.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” said Stefan.
“Yeah,” said Jayson. “We hop a tanker ant and we ride it up those cliffs. We end up outside Hormiga Canyon.”
“The fast track to far-future L. A.,” said Stefan. “Let’s do it.”
“Help me with the bike.” said Jayson, turning back towards the cave.
“The
what
?”
“Come on, it’ll start. They built bikes to last, back then. We’ll do a stunt-man number. We’ll speed up, ride up that stone ramp over there, and we land on the back of a giant ant. That’ll be a bitchin’ effect.”
Stefan was doubtful, but of course Jayson’s plan worked. They landed like ant-lice on the hide of a tanker ant the size of a ship. The behemoth took no notice of them. The boys wedged themselves, and Jayson’s machine, among the giant ant’s weird organic landscape of chitinous pores and uncanny bristles. Then they held tight.
The tanker ant surged upwards, ever upwards and—emerged onto a sunlit, dusty California hilltop. She hesitated, tasting the air with her feelers. The boys rolled themselves and the bike off the ant’s back, sliding onto the familiar yellow grass. For her part, the ant headed into a nearby apricot orchard and began harvesting the fruit-laden trees whole.
Here outside the Canyon, the sun no longer moved in that frenetic fashion. This California sun was setting gently and respectably, in the west, the way a sun ought to set. The sun looked rather too weary, too large and too red. But sunsets were always like that.
Down the hillside was a long, dusty highway, a black, paved, four lane strip with white stripes down the middle. From the distance came a shining, metallic truck. As it passed then by, with a Doppler whoosh, it resolved into a long-haul
ant
, a rolling monster with a big-eyed head like a truck-cab, a fully-rounded cargo belly, and six stout red leg-axles, adorned with six big whirring black wheels.
Shielding their eyes, the boys followed the departing ant-truck with their gaze. There were sunlit towers scraping the horizon, gleaming and crystalline.
More vehicles passed then, in deft, high-speed cluster-groups of traffic. The whizzing cars and trucks were all segmented, six-wheeled, and scarily fast. Low-slung, gleamy speedsters. Burly station-wagons.
The boys wheeled the motorcycle downhill to the dusty edge of the busy freeway. Their hair was tossed by the backwash of passing ants.
One of the vehicles, a black and white one with large red eyes, slowed to give them a once-over. Luckily it didn’t stop.
Jayson sniffed the highway air. It smelled like burning booze poured over a fruitcake. “Well, they’ve got fuel,” he diagnosed.
“I wonder how ants managed to evolve internal combustion engines.”
“Heck, dog, I’m wondering how ants managed to evolve
wheels
.”
“In their own diffuse, distributed way, these ants have got some kind of mandible-grip on the laws of nature,” said Stefan. Gently he cleared his throat. “That’s largely thanks to me, I suppose.”
“Gotta be a filling station up this road somewhere,” said Jayson, ignoring him. “We’re down to our last quart.” He kicked his Indian into life. Stefan hopped on.
As they motored into the sprawling heart of Los Angeles, it was clear as the fruit-scented air that they were eons into the future. Stefan had always known his town as a jammed, overloaded, makeshift, somewhat threatening city, with large patches of violent poverty and film-noir urban decline. This Los Angeles was as neat as a Le Corbusier sketch: spacey radiant towers, picturesque ragged palms, abundant fruit trees.
Sure enough, they came across a nearly spherical cask-ant dispensing distilled fruit alcohol from her rear end. When prodded by the handlebars of Jayson’s bike, she dribbled a handy fill-up into his tank.
Twilight fell, and little ball-shaped lights blinked on. They had no visible source of power.
“String theory on parade,” said Stefan, pointing them out to Jayson. “Zero-point energy. I was planning to invent all that some day.”
“Sure, dog, sure.”
Every ant within this city was a wheeled giant. The ants were clearly the dominant species in town. Most of the city was devoted to their cloverleaves, off ramps and parking-lots.
Then there were the people: gleaming, healthy Californians with amazing skin-tones. There were steady little streams of them, going about their own business, often with bundles on their heads: water-jars and fruit-baskets, mostly.
It seemed that humans as a species had been much harder to kill off than one might have expected. These far-future humans were not making much of a fuss about themselves any more, but given how many were deftly creeping in and out of cracks in the shining towers, they probably had the giant ants outnumbered.
“They’re all walking,” Stefan noted.
“Nobody walks in L.A! We’re the only cats in this town with our own wheels?” Jayson lifted one hand from the throttle. “Hey look! My cosmic string wristband is gone.”
“Everything except the ants is the right size here, dude,” said Stefan, examining his own bare wrist. “That means our bracelets are smaller than protons now.”
Jayson waved his wrist as if this news stung him a little. Then he suddenly veered to the side of the road. “Hey dog, check her out! This rich chick is flagging us down!”
The woman in question was wearing a fetching little antskin cuirass. Her glossy hair was high-piled on her head and she wore a necklace, a belt, and neat platform sandals. She had an unknown flower in her hair and a very nice tan.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Jayson gallantly. “Do you speak Eloi?”
The woman thoughtfully caressed the glassy headlight of Jayson’s bike. The two boys were dirty, unshaven, and stinking of camp-fires. They also spoke no known language and were riding a mechanical ant, but their new friend seemed willing to overlook all that. She might even think such things were cute and dashing.
She smiled at Jayson in a sunny, mystical fashion, opened her beaded shoulder-bag, and offered him a fresh orange.
Jayson ripped into it, grinning.
“She’s not your normal type, Jayson.”
“Yeah, she’s a cool, classy dame straight outta Beverly Hills! I think my luck is finally changing!”
A small crowd of men, women, even children clustered around the bike. These sidewalk gawkers definitely liked a show. They chatted pleasantly, tapping each other reassuringly on the heads and shoulders.
“We’re drawing a big crowd,” Stefan said. “Should we split?”
“Are you kidding? This is the public! We’ll entertain them!”
Jayson fashioned a bit of his orange peel into a set of jack-o-lantern snaggle teeth and wore them in his mouth. The woman in the antskin cuirass laughed with pleasure.
Stefan picked a smooth pebble on the ground, showed it off to the gawkers, palmed it, and pretended to swallow it. The onlookers were stunned. When he “burped it back up,” they applauded him wildly.
Stefan gazed across their pleased, eager faces. “This is a very soft audience, Jayson. I think they’re truly starved for techno-wizardry.”
A shy girl stood at the back of the crowd. She looked sober and thoughtful. She knew he had done a trick. She wondered why. She was like Emily Yu: smarter than the rest, but too tenderhearted.
Stefan waved at her and offered his best smile. She stood up straighter, startled. She looked from one side of herself to the other, amazed that he was paying attention just to her.
He beckoned at her. He pointed. He waved both his arms. Yes, you. She was so excited by this that he could see her heart beating softly in the side of her throat.
He was instantly in love.
============
Written March, 2007.
Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine
, 2007.
In person, Bruce is so charismatic that every time we talk face to face I feel like writing a story with him again. So when Bruce turned up at my house for a night or two in summer, 2007, we eagerly began making new plans.
His initial idea for this story was to write about a city in a large bottle in an apartment in a slum in L.A., the city a bit like the city of Kandor in the
Superman
comics. And I particularly wanted to finally write a story about giant ants, a classic SF power chord.
The collaboration was, as it sometimes is with Bruce, emotional for me. It’s like I send him something that I think is done, and then he pounds craters into it and saws off parts of it and sends it back with the raw stubs, sometimes at a shorter word length than what I sent him. After I scrape myself off the ceiling, I begin complaining about what he’s done, he goes for my throat, and it’s business as usual.
In a way it’s fun. It reminds me that I’m alive. Another reason I continue to work with Bruce is that I get a different texture to my prose. It’s like a painter distressing his canvas and layering on another coat. And each time I learn more about cuts. Co-authoring a story with Bruce is like the ultimate writer’s workshop. He’ll go in and cut a couple of words out of nearly every sentence that I’ve written. And then, outraged, I take out his weaker lines. It makes the prose stronger. Of course, after the cuts, there’s a lot of broken segues to fix.
We had the by-now customary series of heated email exchanges, even though I’d sworn to myself that this time would be different. Actually I’m not sure Bruce even gets emotional, maybe it’s just me. He likes to remind me that, after all, it’s only ink on paper, or no, only bits in a datastream.
We went ten rounds, and by the end we were bloodied and out on our feet, and it was time to stop. Upshot? It’s a great story. And we scored an
Asimov’s
cover illo.
It’s a pleasant June evening in the funky California beach town of Surf City. Shadows lengthen across the state university campus, nestled amid redwoods and pastures above the town; on the bay, wetsuited surfers bob and slide on the tubes off Parker Point, their waves gilded by the setting sun.
The Boardwalk amusement park’s chains of lights are coming on; squeals burst irregularly from the roller-coaster. Low cars creep down the beachfront avenue, pumping beat-heavy music. Couples and families stroll about; kids play in the yards of the grimy pastel homes in the side streets off the Boardwalk; skaters grind and flip along railings, stoops and curbs. Borne upon the cool evening breeze, the smells of grease and oregano waft from a waterside warehouse restaurant.
The establishment’s marquee displays a long-snouted grinning cartoon rat holding a surfboard and an oversized slice of pizza, the slice flopping down to drip a cheese-strand onto the rat’s gnarly bare toes. The rat wears a top hat and a long red T-shirt labeled
C. R.
The marquee sign reads:
Cheezemore Ratt’s Surf Shack