Elai’s brows rose, the fair lines of silver prominent on her tanned face. But melancholy had already crept back into her gaze.
I said to her, “A giant diving is something everyone should see before they die.”
We passed the first giant corpse six weeks into the journey. At a distance, the huge bones jutting from the barren ground looked like the frame of a building that didn’t yet exist. Closer, the skull half-buried in the sand stared with a sad, empty gaze.
The caravan halted by the old corpse, like it always did.
“Is that what I think it is?” Elai asked, her voice wavering the tiniest fraction. Seeing something as magnificent as a giant dead always touched people, no matter how thick a shell they’d built around themselves.
“It is,” I said, my shell cracking a little more.
Elai riveted her gaze on her dirty fingernails. The dry breeze played with the strands that had escaped from her braid, plastering them soon enough against her skin. The night before, she’d cried in her sleep, but I reckoned the toughness of the journey wasn’t to blame.
I jumped down and offered her my hand. “Come.”
She pulled herself together and accepted my help. She no longer smelled of perfume, but honest sweat.
A sizeable crowd had already gathered around the giant’s corpse. They strolled from bone to bone in respectful silence. The children couldn’t understand why and were trying to climb atop the skull despite their parents’ hisses.
Elai veered to a halt under the dome of the giant’s ribcage. “What killed it?”
We were still in the middle of the desert, far away from the railroads and mines. This giant had died of old age. “Sometimes even the giants fall.”
“Surely that is a rare thing to happen,” she said, hoping her disbelief would make the words true.
I didn’t want to lie to her, and so I said nothing. The miners and railroad workers cared little about the giants that set foot on their grounds. Rather, they shot the beasts dead, ripped off the hides, and left the bodies rotting in the desert.
Elai wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.
I said to her in a low voice, “Don’t grieve after things that still exist. Cry only when all is lost.”
She tried to meet my gaze, but I wouldn’t let her. She understood to wander farther and give me privacy.
As always, when the caravan left the giant’s corpse behind, I thought of the horrid accident, the echo of the bullet hitting flesh, and the growing pool of blood.
Another corpse, that of my best friend.
We glimpsed the End of the World after eleven weeks on the road. The town stood by the ocean, on a cliff that even the tallest of waves couldn’t reach. The year before, it had been barely more than a collection of a dozen or so ramshackle houses. The recent finding of silver had doubled the town in size.
Elai craned on the seat, frowning at the empty beach below the cliff. “Is this really all there is?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the End of the World was nothing more than a rugged town, despite the fancy name. “If you’re in luck, you might see some giants swimming when the night falls.”
The caravan stopped at the outskirts of town. I unloaded the wagon and handed over what little my customers had afforded to bring with them—worn leather suitcases with perhaps a change of clothes inside, a mirror with a gilded frame, a few bottles of wine that would be worth a fortune here. The families hastened off to find cheap lodgings, to start their lives anew. The loners, Elai amongst them, who didn’t quite know which way to go, hovered about my wagon.
I gave them the usual talk. “Here we are then, at the End of the World. Watch out for the cheap tequila and cunning women. And try not to lose too much at the card tables.”
All but Elai left. For a moment, I held hopes that perhaps she didn’t want to part from me either.
“The caravan will leave in a week or so,” I said to her. The journey back would take longer as the caravan would need to stop at the Lasuo villages to buy giant salt crystals. Though, if the miners had found silver, we might prefer to load our wagons with the precious metal.
“I will stay here,” Elai said. “Don’t worry about me.”
Then she, too, left without so much as a glance over her shoulder.
I stood still for a long while, waiting for her to return, even though I knew she wouldn’t.
The evening crept to veil the town while I fed and watered Edison and Beat. The camel-oxen sensed my sadness and rubbed their snouts against me. I scratched them, searching for comfort that eluded me.
Suddenly, both Edison and Beat stiffened and fell all silent. Then I heard the throaty whispers too.
The wind carried the roars of the giants returning from the sea.
Elai shivered on the cliff’s edge, humming an overly dramatic overture from an opera that didn’t end well. The stars hung low enough to light the scene of the giants wading through the waves, climbing up the beach. The scene’s morbid beauty haunted my heart.
I approached Elai slowly. If I were to rush at her, drag her away from the treacherous ground, she might fight back and take both of us to the abyss below.
“Nice night to watch the giants,” I said nonchalantly, as if I didn’t care for her at all.
“I beg your pardon,” Elai exclaimed, turning around to meet me. Her heels sent a shower of pebbles into the dark sea.
“What are you thinking?” I asked, though I knew. She had come to the End of the World, never to return.
“Nothing much,” she lied. She resumed gazing at the giants, undoubtedly wishing I would leave.
I couldn’t respect her wish. I had grown fond of her company. “Really?”
“Could you please …” Elai started, but just then, the biggest giant I had ever seen surfaced. Forty feet tall, centuries old, the beast’s sudden appearance made Elai freeze in wonder, forget her gloom.
“The giants are returning home,” I said. The sight always comforted me. I hoped she found solace in it too.
“Does anyone know why they do what they do?” Elai asked, her question the one she wished to ask from me. She’d seen through my disguise, knew I hadn’t always been a wagoner.
I preferred not to dwell in the past, so I pretended to think about the giants. Why did anyone travel across the desert, from the glaciers to the sea and back? Why did I travel the same route year after year?
“There are three kinds of people who come to this town,” I said. “Those who try to escape their past, those who fear their future, and those who have no reason to do either.”
“Which one are you?” Elai asked. “Why did you …”
The roar of the ancient giant drowned her voice. The other giants halted in their tracks, grunted greetings.
Since I’d left the Old World, I hadn’t met anyone who could understand what I’d been through. Perhaps Elai would trust me, abandon her plans, if I revealed my secret. “A long time ago,” I said, my heart still raw with pain and loss, “I was a young man with a bright future. One night, my very best friend thought I’d cheated in a game of cards and challenged me to a duel.”
“You won,” Elai said. She knew the etiquette and the rules. I could have stayed in the Old World and continued my life as if nothing at all had happened. It puzzled her that I hadn’t.
“It didn’t feel like winning,” I replied, remembering the lightness of the trigger under my finger, the careless act that had ruined two lives. I had done wrong, even though no one would ever say it aloud. “I came here to punish myself, but it’s not as bad here as I deserve.”
The ancient giant reached the rest of the herd. The beast shivered to shake off extra water, and it almost looked like it rained down on the beach. As the wind picked up, a few drops reached Elai and me.
“Why did you leave the Old World?” I asked her. Why
did she want to take her own life?
Elai closed her eyes as if her sorrow were too great to express. She wiped a lock of hair from her forehead, fixed it behind her ear. “My father owns the United Company. He would see all this ruined just to increase his fame and fortune.”
Elai’s revelation explained a lot: her melancholy, the guilt she felt. I placed a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t move away.
“Did you think that he would back off from building the railroad if you jumped off the cliff at the End of the World?”
The ancient giant bellowed a loud roar, pointed north. The herd replied with a deafening rumble. They started together the journey toward the mountains.
“Yes,” Elai said, her voice brittle, frail, “but now that I’ve had further time to think about it, it doesn’t seem like such a great idea.”
We watched the giants’ slow progress for a long time. I had searched for atonement from punishing myself. Now, after walking the desert in circles for years, I’d wound up in the right place to save a life. “I reckon your father would rather have you back than finish his railroad.”
Elai shrugged, but I knew she took my words to heart. The world was changing, true, but it was up to us to decide the direction. No one should die to make a point.
As the night faded to make way for the morning, she took my hand. “I think I shall join the caravan on the way back. I shall tell my father about the giants. It’s not yet their time to die.”
... And Now Thirty
by Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg has been a professional science fiction writer since 1955, and is the author of hundreds of stories and books, among them such titles as Lord Valentine’s Castle, Nightwings and Dying Inside. His most recent book is Tales of Majipoor. He is a many-times winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, was guest of honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Heidelberg in 1970 and in 2004 was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
A Writers of the Future judge from the very first year of the Contest, he received the L. Ron Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts in 2003.
Robert and his wife Karen live in the San Francisco Bay area.
... And Now Thirty
Five years ago, in the twenty-fifth anthology of the Writers of the Future Contest, I had this to say about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Contest:
“Back in the 1930s and 1940s, before his thoughts turned first to Dianetics and then to Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard was one of the most versatile and prolific of the pulp-magazine storytellers. From his white-hot typewriter poured a prodigious stream of tales in just about every genre of fiction that those gaudy old magazines dealt in: westerns, mysteries, stories of the mysterious Orient, sea adventures, Arctic adventures, air adventures—you name it, and he wrote it. A tour through the long list of his story titles gives us the full flavor of that long-vanished era: ‘Cargo of Coffins,’ ‘The Trail of the Red Diamonds,’ ‘The Blow Torch Murder,’ ‘Hell’s Legionnaire,’ ‘The Baron of Coyote River,’ ‘The Bold Dare All,’ ‘Red Death Over China,’ ‘Yukon Madness,’ and on and on and on.
“But of all the many kinds of fiction that he wrote, science fiction and fantasy certainly were closest to L. Ron Hubbard’s heart. He did the westerns and the Yukon stories and the yellow-peril stuff to pay the rent, I'm pretty sure; but there can be no doubt that he wrote the science fiction and fantasy out of love.… Hubbard’s works of science fiction and fantasy long ago established themselves as classics of their kind, and have had no difficulty maintaining their continuing existence in print through decade after decade. The enduring popularity of such Hubbard novels as Fear, Final Blackout, Slaves of Sleep and Typewriter in the Sky, all of them fantasy or science fiction and all of them dating back to the early years of the 1940s, shows that he wrote them with something more in mind than his next paycheck. And when he briefly returned to professional writing after the World War II hiatus, at a time when nearly all the old pulp-magazine categories were extinct, it was primarily science fiction and fantasy that he wrote, stories like the Old Doc Methuselah series and the novel To the Stars, rather than more Oriental adventure tales or stories of life at sea.
“And so it was not surprising that late in his life, long after he had taken a break from his writing career to bring Scientology into the world, he would turn again to writing science fiction—with the huge novel Battlefield Earth and the gigantic multi-volume Mission Earth series, and, in 1983, would establish the Writers of the Future Contest to develop and encourage new talent in the field that he loved.”
And I said this, thirty years ago in the first of these volumes of annual award anthologies:
“We were all new writers once—even Sophocles, even Homer, even Jack Williamson. And I think we all must begin in the same way, those of us who are going to be writers. We start by being consumers of the product: in childhood we sit around the campfire, listening to the storyteller, caught in his spell, lost in the fables he spins, envying and admiring him for the magical skill with which he holds us. ‘I wonder how he does that,’ we think—concerned, even then, as much with technique, the tricks of the trade, as we are with the matter of the tales being told.…”
And ten years ago, paying tribute to L. Ron Hubbard, the Contest’s founder, in an essay I wrote for the twentieth annual anthology, I had this to say:
“Hubbard too had been a young, struggling writer once, in the pulp-magazine days of the 1930s. He loved science fiction and he wanted to ease the way for talented and deserving beginners who could bring new visions to the field. His idea was to call for stories from writers who had never published any science fiction—gifted writers standing at the threshold of their careers—and to assemble a group of top-ranking science fiction writers to serve as the judges who would select the best of those stories. The authors of the winning stories would receive significant cash prizes and a powerful publicity spotlight would be focused on them at an annual awards ceremony.”
And this is what I wrote twenty years ago, when I was helping Writers of the Future celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of its annual story contest:
“All of them [such early prizewinners as Karen Joy Fowler, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Robert Reed and Dave Wolverton] were amateurs ten years ago, when this Contest began. But you see their names regularly in print these days. Like you (and like Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and, yes, Robert Silverberg) they wanted very, very much to be published writers, and, because they had the talent, the will, and the perseverance, they made it happen.”
And, again, once more quoting my essay from the twentieth anniversary anthology: “The amateurs of today are the Hugo and Nebula winners of tomorrow. The Writers of the Future Contest is helping to bring that about.”
I quote myself again and again from these four anthologies, spanning two and a half decades, because I’ve been a part of this remarkable enterprise since the beginning—one of the founding judges, along with Theodore Sturgeon, Roger Zelazny, C.L. Moore, Jack Williamson, Stephen Goldin and Gregory Benford. Of that initial group, which included some of the brightest stars in the science fiction galaxy, very few are still alive, and only Gregory Benford is still an active judge. (I withdrew from judging myself, after nearly thirty years of service, a couple of years ago, but as an emeritus judge I remain a friend and supporter of the Contest.) Over the years, many another illustrious writer has been part of that board of judges—Frederik Pohl, Larry Niven, Tim Powers, Frank Herbert, Orson Scott Card, Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, Hal Clement and more—and the luster of those names will tell you the importance of the po
sition that the Writers of the Future Contest holds within the field of science fiction. Judgeship has even begun to carry over to the second generation, now, with Brian Herbert and Todd McCaffrey, the sons of Frank Herbert and Anne McCaffrey, replacing their progenitors on the panel.
But though the list of judges is an awesome one, what really counts is the list of winners. The very first anthology includes stories by such then-unknown writers as Karen Joy Fowler and David Zindell, both of whom have gone on to considerable writing careers. But if one pulls almost any volume of the series down from the shelves, one will find the early work of writers of the future who went on to become significant writers of the present: here are Ken Liu, Jay Lake and Myke Cole in the nineteenth volume alone, Stephen Baxter and Jamil Nasir in Volume Five, A.C. Crispin in Volume Ten. And so it has gone, year after year, with many of the early contestants coming back to become judges themselves.
The mechanics of the Contest haven’t changed in any significant way since the beginning. Entry is limited to writers who have never had a novel or a novella professionally published, and no more than three short stories. The manuscripts submitted are winnowed at the Contest’s Los Angeles headquarters by the Contest’s staff and coordinating director, and every three months a group of six or eight of them is submitted to the judges. (The authors’ names are removed from the manuscripts, to prevent the possibility that a judge might encounter the work of a friend or student.) Each of these quarterly Contests produces a first-place winner, who receives a cash award and a certificate of merit, and at the end of the year the judges are shown the manuscripts of all the quarterly winners, out of which they select a Grand Prize winner, who is given another and very generous cash grant. An annual awards ceremony brings the winners, the runners-up, and the judges together, and that year’s Contest is given permanence by the publication of the top stories in an annual paperback anthology, of which the present volume is the thirtieth. The complete set of anthologies forms quite an impressive shelf. It is not a big surprise, nor should it be, that so many of the winners and runners-up of these competitions should have gone on to major careers as science fiction writers or that their early work, as represented in these books, quite clearly displays the merits that would mark the fiction of their mature years ahead.