Objections started welling up inside Eesyan again, but then he met Frenua's eyes. They were bright, inspired, shining with a light that he hadn't seen anywhere for a long time. He could sense the same intensity of feeling radiating from Calazar. Something inside Eesyan the scientist was responding to it. And as it grew and swelled deep down inside his being, the negative fixations that had gripped him seemed to shrink to dimensions fitting to the business of a jobbing-shop clerk.
Visions were stirring in his own mind now, of the Ganymeans long ago who had cast out from the havens of their warm, familiar-sun systems into the daunting voids between, who had dared to dream of constructions the size of moons and taming the power of exploding stars. Were the unknowns and the challenges that they had faced any less than of the prospect that was beckoning now? Could the things they stood to gain and to learn have been any greater?
"Yes!" he heard himself whisper. It was involuntary-not he speaking, but the spirit that was motivating him inside; yet even as he the word, he knew that it was right. Calazar turned away, fidgeting with his hands, seemingly having difficulty keeping his feelings under control. Showm was on her feet, looking as if she were fighting back an impulse to throw her arms around Eesyan and hug him. "Yes!" Eesyan said again, louder this time. "We will do it! Our race has lived in security and complacency for long enough. It is time for us to rekindle the flame and know again the adventure of true discovery. You are right, Frenua. Minerva will live again, and become what it should have been-maybe even in a new reality that we will create! This was surely meant to be."
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.