"That should get you here ahead of it just fine. Kids okay?"
"Sure. I'll let 'em tell ya." Jud turned and passed back a hand mike on a stretch cord. "Hey, Kles, wanna say hi to your uncle?"
"Thanks… Hello? Uncle Urgran?"
"Right here, buddy. It's been a while. Everyone's looking forward to seeing you back around the camp again. We've got some interesting new things to show you."
"Giants' things?" As was true of many young people, Kles had always had a particular fascination for the lost race that had lived on Minerva long ago. There was a scientific name for them that meant "long-headed sapient bipedal vertebrates," but for most people they were simply the "Giants."
"You bet. More bones-three complete skeletons, at least. Parts of some buildings."
"Fantastic!"
"And pieces of machines… but all pretty flaky and corroded. We're not sure what most of them are."
"Maybe Laisha will know. She's the one who wants to be an engineer, like her dad. Can she say hi too?"
"Sure."
Kles held the mike toward her and nodded. Laisha took it. "Mr. Fyme?"
"Well, that's nice, but it's generally Urg to everyone around here. So you're going to be our guest for a couple of weeks, eh? Know much about archeology?"
"Not a lot, to be honest. As Kles just said, I'm more into science and technical stuff. But it sounds really interesting, and I can't wait to get there. Thanks so much for inviting me!"
"Well, I'm warning you, two weeks of the air up here and food the way the Iskois cook it, and you might not wanna go back. But one thing at a time, huh?"
"One of the people my dad works with showed me a piece of Giants' supermass once," Laisha said. "It was only the size of a fingernail, but you couldn't lift it. That was really weird."
"I've seen some of that too in my time," Urgran answered. "Well, we'll see you soon."
"Okay. 'Bye."
Kles passed the mike and its cord back to Jud. "You never told be about that supermass before," he said to Laisha.
"Yes, well, er… it wasn't really me," she confessed, coloring. "But I heard my dad talk about it."
Kles shook his head. "Don't ever say anything to Uncle Urgran that isn't absolutely straight," he said. "He's got this way of sounding easygoing and all that, but underneath he's real sharp. He'll catch you out. And once he does, he'll never quite rate you the same again."
"I'll remember," Laisha promised.
The archeologists' camp was set up near a settlement of a local tribe called the Iskois, who built their houses over excavated pits from cemented rocks and bricks of frozen soil. They did domestic chores for the scientists in return for tools, clothing, and supplies from the equatorial-zone cities, and made good housekeepers. That evening, after a supper of venison stew and a savory mash called lanakil, made from some kind of tuber and herbs, Urgran took Kles and Laisha across from the cabin that served as the general mess area, where they had eaten, to the lab shack, which also housed the generator. The night was cold and clear, with the hills and scattered clumps of scrub-trees looking white and ghostly in the light of a thin crescent of moon. Earth was just rising, low in the sky to one side of it.
"The place we're digging at the moment is about six miles north," he told them as he opened the outer door of the threshold, turned on the lights, and ushered them through. "Seems to have been some kind of heavy construction, maybe part of a spacecraft base. Laisha should be interested. We'll go up and have a look at it tomorrow. For now, I thought we'd show her some of the bones. I know you've seen this before, Kles." Laisha had seen all the usual things about Giants in books and mythical adventure movies, of course, and a few skeletons in museums, but it wasn't a subject she had ever gone into in much detail.
To Kles this was incomprehensible. He devoured every piece of new information on them to be published. His room at home was a miniature museum of Giants models and trophies, with most of one wall taken up by a map showing a reconstruction of Minerva in the vanished Age of the Giants. He and some of his like-minded friends had visited the excavated ruins of some of their cities, and gazed in awe at the massive foundations and bases of structures that experts said had towered above the landscape, sometimes for thousands of feet. They had built spacecraft powered by principles that Lunarian scientists, racing to develop the means for staging a mass migration to Earth before Minerva became uninhabitable, had still not uncovered. A legend read by some into the fragments of Giants' writings that had been recovered and interpreted told that they were not extinct as skeptics maintained, but had migrated from Minerva themselves to a new home at a distant star. The reason why was not clear. Some thought the climate might be cyclic, bringing about conditions before that had been similar to those threatening the Lunarian civilization today. According to the legend, the star was one located twenty light-years from the Solar System, that had come to be called the Giants' Star. It was not visible from the latitude of Ezangen, but Kles had stood gazing up at it for what must have added up to hours over the years, hoping that the legend was true and trying to picture the kind of world the Giants would be living in now.
The room held two large work tables with sinks, laboratory glassware, a couple of microscopes, and other scientific apparatus, with walls of closets, tool racks, and shelves of bottles and jars. Kles recognized specimens of Giant skeletons both on the work tops and in several containers of preservative to one side. Although there wasn't an example of one complete and assembled, a large wall chart showed the overall plan. The adults had stood eight to nine feet tall. Urgran moved over to it, at the same time picking up a plastic cast of an elongated skull.
"You have to have seen this before," he said, addressing Laisha. "No one could be around Kles more than five minutes without hearing about it. See, they didn't have receded chins and flat faces the way we do. They were kinda more horselike, with this down-pointing snout that gets wider at the top to give you a broad spacing for the eyes-which are more forward-looking than a horse's. Then on the back, instead of a round braincase like ours, you've got this protruding shape that counterbalances the weight… And the shoulders, completely different with these overlapping bone plates-almost like some kinda armor. Not just some spindly collar bone that wild kids like Kles are always breaking." Urgran gestured toward the far wall. "We've got some parts over there."
Laisha stepped forward to peer more closely at the center section of the figure shown on the chart. "It is true they had six… you know, arms, legs, whatever?"
"Hey, she's not so slow, Kles! Right… see there." Urgran pointed to two sets of bone structures set on either side of the thick hoop of bone braced by a forward-pointing strut, girding the bottom of the rib cage-the Giants didn't have a splayed pelvic dish in the way of humans; they were thought to have carried the internal abdominal organs more by suspension than by support from below. "Vestigial limb structures. You're right. Although these guys walked on two legs and used two arms the same as we do, the family of life that they're part of has a different body pattern based on three pairs. Original native Minervan life."
"The way you can still see in the fish," Kles put in, although Laisha was aware of it. The original Minervan land dwellers had been hexadic too, but predators were unknown among them, and they had been replaced by the the current types, which had appeared suddenly in the period immediately following the disappearance of the Giants. Nothing that anticipated the new population with its quadrupedal architecture existed in Minerva's earlier fossil record, and there was little doubt that it was descended from ancestors imported by the Giants. Most scientists believed Earth to have been their place of origin, although this had never been proved. Flyby probes had confirmed that it was teeming with life, but the first landers were still en route and not due to arrive for several months. But if it was true, it would add a whole new significance to the planned migration. For the imported population had included the ancestors of humans too. It meant that the Lunarians would be going home.