Mission to Minerva

PART TWO: Mission to Minerva
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

"Kles! Look! Bears!" Laisha shouted excitedly above the noise of the engine and the rotors. They were riding with the supply flight that went up to Ezangen two or three times a month. Klesimur turned his attention away from the mountains ahead above the pilot's shoulder, crowning the skyline like white fangs, and looked below where she was pointing. Disturbed by the sound and seemingly being pursued by the spinwing's shadow, two adult bears were herding four cubs away from the river bank and up a slope showing streaks of snow toward the cover of some rocks and fallen trees, probably where their lair was.

"Brown tundras," Kles confirmed. "You'll see plenty more when we get to the camp. Don't try getting too near them, even if they do look cute. They can be nasty. But they stay away from people in groups. So no straying off on your own up there." He looked up at her. At twelve, only two years younger than himself, she still had many of what seemed the ways of a child. But her family had moved to the town when she was at an early age, and she still spent most of her time there. And she learned fast. Her face was bright and eager, a little pink in the cabin's heat with her heavy hooded jacket, happy at the thought of being away and free for a couple of weeks. Kles grinned reassuringly. "But we'll take good care of you. Haven't I always?"

The crackle of a radio coming to life came from somewhere forward, followed by, "Ezangen camp calling. You reading, Jud?"

The pilot acknowledged. "Hi, Urg. This is Jud."

"How's it going up there? We may have some weather coming in."

"We're just approaching the bottom end of the lake now. Should be, aw… another ten, fifteen minutes."

"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.

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."

Then learning and experiment led to the emergence of science, engineering, new technologies, and the harnessing of revolutionary forms of energy. Machines opened up regions of vast untapped resources beneath the ice, and when the dream of artificial flight became a reality, followed rapidly by the development of regular air travel, the notion took root, inspired by the legend of the Giants, of moving the Lunarian civilization to Earth, closer to the Sun. This became the racial quest.

Most of the various tribes, clans, nations and so forth that made up the population were ruled by some form of the hereditary monarch or popular chieftain that Lunarians had traditionally turned to for ordering their affairs. As the goal of survival by migration became the common enterprise, the pattern of previous history led them to merge and combine their efforts until, apart from a few fringe communities, the map had consolidated into the two major groupings of Cerios and Lambia.

Kles and Laisha were Cerians. Why such things should matter much was a mystery as far as he was concerned, but as the pace of life quickened with the coming of the new technologies, and change seemed to become the rule for everything, Cerios had replaced its royal house with a president heading a congress of representatives that the people appointed. Some kind of theory that most Cerians apparently supported said that this would lead to a decentralized system of research and production in which many different groups competing with each other would produce better results faster. The Lambians, on the other hand, believed this could only result in chaos, duplication, and ruinous waste, and the old, proven methods of central direction and coordination were the only way of achieving any coherent program; in any case, this wasn't a time to be tearing down what had been shown to work and replacing it by something unknown that might not. So Lambia still had a king, with the people being represented by a limited parliament.

The two powers had coexisted in this way since Kles's father's time with neither demonstrating anything that was obviously superior. The advocates on both sides emphasized their own successes and the other's failures, while the critics of both said that ability and knowledge were what counted, not theories on how they should be motivated-as if the present circumstances required any additional motivation, anyway.

The more ominous development that Urg, Jud, and Rez were talking about was fairly recent. Taking the traditional Lunarian view that resources belonged to all, the Lambian king, Perasmon, had accused the Cerians of squandering a future that belonged to the Lambians as much as to themselves. If the Cerians were not going to safeguard it responsibly, Perasmon said, then the Lambians had the right to take charge of it themselves, forcibly if necessary. He was setting aside a sector of Lambian industry to develop appropriate equipment for a contingency force to be armed and trained accordingly. Now it sounded as if President Harzin was saying that Cerios had no choice but to follow suit.

Kles was still too numbed by the implications to even want to think about it. Kings, presidents, all other the kinds of leaders who had headed communities… were there to serve people, to organize ways to help them live better. It was why people had always listened to them and trusted them. But this talk now was about designing and making things to kill people. Not just hunting weapons, or the kind that sheriffs and town marshals and sometimes companies of volunteers needed for stopping criminals or dealing with the bandit gangs that appeared in outlying areas from time to time, but for threatening ordinary people who hadn't done anything.

Long ago, there had been barbaric tribes and even upstart nations that tried to live by violence and preying upon their neighbors. But they had never lasted long among a vaster majority once the majority was driven to take action, and civilized ways had spread to become universal to the point where most Lunarians were probably incapable of conceiving anything else. To hear a king talking now about organizing to violently attack another nation was like the thought of being ruled by bandits. Perasmon said he had no choice. Kles didn't know what choices kings did or didn't have, but it seemed unbelievable that the whole adult world with all its complexities and resourcefulness couldn't come up with some other way of resolving the problem. He had seen the corpses of animals felled by bullets and spears, and once, when he was younger, the charred remains of two occupants of a car that had gone off a cliff. His mind conjured up a picture of something like that happening to Laisha-not from an accident or one of the misfortunes that life brought sometimes, but inflicted deliberately by someone, with a device that others had designed and made for the purpose. The thought was so horrifying that Kles felt unable to finish his stew.

But it was only for a moment. The stew was Opril's best. He pushed the morbid images from his mind and buttered a hunk of crusty bread to mop the dish.

"How is it?" his uncle asked.

"Mmm… Good."

"You've gone very quiet. It's not like you."

"Just hungry, I guess. It's been a long day."

Urgran looked at him. "Don't take too much notice of all the talk, Kles. They're just posturing. It can't get that bad. Everyone knows that."

"Urg's right. Perasmon can't be serious," Rez said again.