They were still talking about the plans for tomorrow, when they heard the outer door open and close. Moments later, Opril, the Iskois woman who took charge of domestic matters around the camp, knocked and entered to let them know that bunk spaces for the two arrivals were prepared. She nodded at Kles and smiled. "Welcome back. I suppose there will be mischief. And this is your friend?"
Kles introduced Laisha. "Anything you need or want done, Opril is the person," he said. "She knows everything there is to know here. And how are Barkan and Quar, Opril?… Her sons," he explained to Laisha.
"Away hunting with their father and others from the village. They should be back late tomorrow. Then there will be full bellies and dancing for days."
"Good timing. Jud brought a couple of cases of good hooch," Urgran said.
"We'll show you how to handle a rangat before you go back," Kles told Laisha. "It's great fun, especially over the rapids."
"Watch those three. They'll have you drowned first, more likely," Opril said.
"Well…" Laisha stifled a yawn. "Oh, excuse me… So long as it isn't tonight." In his enthusiasm, Kles hadn't realized how tired she was looking.
"Come on. I'll show you where you'll be staying," Opril said. "I've put your things there already."
Urgran eyed Kles inquiringly. "I'm heading back to the parlor for a mug of something hot before I turn in. Want to join me?"
"Sure." Being treated like one of the men felt good. Urgran turned out the lights to leave just the generator drumming in the darkness at the rear, and they went back out into the cold. At the entrance to the mess cabin, Opril said goodnight and continued on with Laisha in the direction of the sleeping hut-part dugout, Iskois style. Kles and Urgar went into the cabin. The air was close and warm inside, with the stove throwing out heat. Jud was at the table, a glass in his hand, looking mellow and contented. A bottle stood amid the litter of used dishes. Another man was sprawled in an easy chair near the stove, large in girth, with red curly hair and several days of stubble, clad in a thick sweater, fur pants, and heavy boots. Kles hadn't met him before. Urgran introduced him as Rez and said he was a mining surveyor and geologist. Urgran checked a pot that was standing on the stove, added water from a jug by the sink, and put the pot back. Then he took another glass from the shelf above, rinsed it, and poured himself a shot from the bottle. "Gotta do something while the hot stuff's heating," he explained to Kles. "Care to try a nip?"
"Well… okay, I guess."
"Attaboy. There's still some things the Iskois can't get right." He passed over a glass with a shorter measure. Kles sipped it, coughed and choked, and hoped the tears in his eyes didn't show.
"Went down the wrong way," he said.
"Yeah, right." This was Uncle Urgran, Kles reminded himself. Who did he think he was kidding?
The TV up on its corner shelf was on, but with the sound turned down. It was showing the Cerian president, Marlot Harzin, looking serious and talking against the backdrop of a picture of Minerva. The caption at the bottom read, division threatens concerted space effort. "What's this, something new?" Urgral gestured with his glass.
"It's a repeat of what he said this afternoon," Jud told him.
"What'd he say this afternoon? I've been up at the hole all day."
"They just can't seem to get their act together with the Lambians. They're serious, Urg. Harzin says we're going to have to be better prepared-as a precaution. Perasmon is saying our ways won't work, and going half and half is just going to take everyone down. It's their survival as well as ours."
Urgran downed half his measure and shook his head. "So his answer is to start diverting part of what they've got? Now we have to do likewise? Doesn't that strike you as just a little bit crazy? Or is it me? Every functioning brain and pair of hands on the planet should be working to get us off of here. But when you've got leaders starting to talk crazy… I never heard the like of that. What do you do if they're not making sense? Aren't they supposed to have it all figured out for the rest of us?"
"I don't know, Urg. I just fly the spinner. Maybe when things get this serious, having that kind of responsibility drives you to it."
"Perasmon can't be serious," Rez declared. "Not at a time like this. It has to be a bluff. Not the kind that I'd say was very smart. Even being able to conceive something like that should be enough to disqualify him from office. Maybe it's because nobody's quite sure yet what the right way is to deal with our kind of system. But it can't be for real."
Urgran scowled and leaned across the table to top up his glass.
Kles stayed out of it, occupying himself by ladling out another bowl of the stew, which was still hot. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly toward his uncle and indicated the pot. Urgran shook his head. "Not for me… Thanks."
Kles didn't follow the politics that the adult world seemed to spend half its time talking about these days. Giants and buried cities, life in the fringe regions, and finding out about animals was more interesting. He didn't understand why they couldn't all get along the way the archeologists and geologists got along with the Iskois.
Minerva had two major populated land areas, called Cerios and Lambia, each straddling the equatorial belt between oceans that became ice-locked in the north and south alternately with the winters. It hadn't always been that way. Long ago, when the ice caps had been much smaller, the oceans had connected all around the planet. The civilization of the Giants had extended into regions that were now covered by permanent ice sheets, which was why so little of it had been found. There were probably the remains of whole cities and who knew what else still waiting to be discovered. The mix of gases in the atmosphere, along with a thin crust that permitted a high flow of heat from the interior, had kept Minerva significantly warmer than it would otherwise have been at its distance from the Sun, for as long as reliable records of the past could be reconstructed. But in recent centuries that had been changing. Towns that had once flourished lay abandoned to the snow, and former farmlands turned into frozen deserts as year by year the advancing ice sheets pushed the populations centers relentlessly back to the equatorial belt.
Earlier peoples, aware of the trend and under no illusions as to the fate that it portended, had resigned themselves to accepting that, like all things and every individual, their world would eventually come to an end and nothing they could do was going to change it. Amassing vast fortunes or striving to gain fame and prestige for themselves in the future was all pretty pointless, since there wasn't going to be one. They applied themselves instead to the arts of civil and harmonious living, the enjoyment of culture, catering to the needs of the young, the sick, the elderly, and the unfortunate, generally pooling what they had to make the experience of life as comfortable as possible for all while the time lasted. Some said that it should never have changed, that people had never been better than in those days. Trying to fend off the natural end to the spell that had been allotted to a world was like propping up a wilting flower that had lived out its days, and in the end just as futile. Didn't the skies show that new flowers were forever budding? The Lunarian word for universe meant "never-ending garden."