The Two Worlds

by James P. Hogan

  THE TWO WORLDS

  two giants novels

  JAMES P. HOGAN

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Introduction copyright © 2007 by James P. Hogan.

  Giants' Star copyright © 1985 by James P. Hogan;

  Entoverse copyright 1991 © by James P. Hogan

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4165-3725-2

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-3725-0

  Cover art by Allan Pollack

  First Baen paperback printing, September 2007

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Printed in the United States of America

  A TOUGH AUDIENCE

  "I regret the intrusion," the holographic image of Broghuilio began. He spoke stiffly, in the manner of somebody performing a duty that demanded a greater show of feeling than he could muster readily. "We have just received news of the most serious nature: all traces of the Shapieron have disappeared from our tracking data. We can only conclude that it has been destroyed." He paused for effect. "The possibility that this could be the result of a deliberate act cannot be dismissed."

  The Thuriens stared back in silence for what seemed a long time. They did not show any concern or dismay . . . or even surprise. The first glimmer of uncertainty crept into Broghuilio's eyes as he searched the Ganymean faces for a reaction. This was not going as he had anticipated.

  One of the other two humans, dressed somberly in dark blue and black, with icy blue eyes, slicked-back silver hair, and a florid face, seemed not to have read the signs. "We tried to warn you," Wylott said, spreading his hands imploringly in a good imitation of sharing the anguish that the Thuriens were presumably supposed to be feeling at that moment. "We told you that Earth would never allow the Shapieron to reach Thurien."

  "Really?" Calazar responded after a pause. He sounded neither convinced nor impressed. "Your concern is most touching, Secretary Wylott. You almost sound as if you believe your own lies."

  By James P. Hogan

  Inherit the Stars

  The Genesis Machine

  The Gentle Giants of Ganymede

  The Two Faces of Tomorrow

  Thrice Upon a Time

  Giants' Star

  Voyage from Yesteryear

  Code of the Lifemaker

  The Proteus Operation

  Endgame Enigma

  The Mirror Maze

  The Infinity Gambit

  Entoverse

  The Multiplex Man

  Realtime Interrupt

  Minds, Machines & Evolution

  The Immortality Option

  Paths to Otherwhere

  Bug Park

  Star Child

  Rockets, Redheads & Revolution

  Cradle of Saturn

  The Legend That Was Earth

  Martian Knightlife

  The Anguished Dawn

  Kicking the Sacred Cow (nonfiction)

  Mission to Minerva

  Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions

  Introduction

  My first book, Inherit the Stars, was published by Ballantine Del Rey in May, 1977. I was living in the UK then, having graduated as an electrical and electronics engineer from the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, and Reading Technical College, and then worked for some years on digital control and instrumentation systems, and then in real-time computer sales with Honeywell and Digital Equipment Corporation. The sortie into writing occurred while I was at DEC, after seeing the movie of Arthur Clarke's 2001. I liked it in many ways but didn't understand the ending, and my subsequent remonstrations to that effect in the office were met with the retort that if I thought I could write something that made more sense why didn't I? This led to an office bet at five pounds a head that I couldn't write a science fiction novel and get it published. The upshot was that I did, and it was, and I made fifty pounds on top of the publisher's advance. Inherit the Stars has been in print continuously throughout the thirty years that have elapsed since, and been translated into many languages.

  1977 was also the year that I moved from the UK to Massachusetts, still with DEC, to manage specialist sales training for their laboratory and scientific computing division. It is sometimes said that writing is not so much a hobby or a profession as an incurable disease. By the time I finished Inherit the Stars I had been bitten sufficiently by the bug to launch into two new novels virtually simultaneously. (This was during the period between the last ice age and the invention of the PC, when e-mail was unknown and private trans-Atlantic phone calls were rarities typically indulged in on birthdays and at Christmas. I found that a beginning writer needs a lot of editorial contact, and having two books going in parallel avoided wasting time while waiting for responses via the three-week communications loop to New York.) These next novels were The Genesis Machine, and The Gentle Giants of Ganymede. Discerning readers may have noticed that they were released in consecutive months, April and May, 1978—six months or so after I arrived in the U.S.A.

  In Inherit the Stars, I had shamelessly stolen Arthur's premise of a mystery discovered in the course of twenty-first-century lunar exploration, sufficient to arouse the excitement of a goodly portion of the scientific community. Instead of an obelisk, however, the mystery took the form of a space-suited corpse, fully human in all anatomical detail, which further examination reveals to have been there for 50,000 years. The scientific detective story that follows establishes "Charlie" to have belonged to a race christened the "Lunarians," from the planet Minerva, that once existed between Mars and Jupiter. They were descended from hominid ancestors who had been transported from Earth by an extinct race of alien giants known as the Ganymeans, Minerva's original natives, named after Jupiter's moon Ganymede, where the first evidence of their existence came to light. When changing conditions rendered the Solar System uninhabitable, the "Giants" migrated to another star system. In the millions of years that followed, the Lunarians emerged on Minerva as a technically advanced but divided human culture that carried its militarization out into space. In a final, cataclysmic war, Minerva was destroyed. The survivors came to Earth at the time of the Neanderthals, multiplied and prevailed over them, and are finally recognized as the direct ancestors of modern man.

  The Gentle Giants of Ganymede picks up at this point, with researchers at the scientific base on Ganymede continuing their investigations of an ancient Ganymean starship discovered deep beneath the ice fields, which provided most of the evidence from which the story of pre-Lunarian Minerva was reconstructed. When the Terrans begin experimenting with equipment recovered from the vessel, a device that they succeed in reactivating turns out to be a signal beacon that attracts a live, functioning Ganymean starship that was sent on an interstellar mission millions of years ago. Through a quirk of relativity physics that came into play following an accident, it has been existing under conditions of extended time-dilation since the era when their kind inhabited Minerva. But their home planet no longer exists. They come to Earth, where they create a sensation, are made welcome, and for six months lead a harmonious existence. It is assumed that the two races will now continue to share the world and a common future. However, that ends when the the Giants depart once more to seek out their own race at a star called the Giants' Star, where the Ganymeans from the Minerva of long ago are believed to have migrated. Many think the story of the migration is a myth. Even if it were true, there is no guarantee that any descendants will still be found there.
But the Giants feel compelled to try.

  These two books, Inherit the Stars, and The Gentle Giants of Ganymede, were the first two titles in what has since developed into the "Giants" series. In April, 2006, Baen Books re-released them in a single-volume combined omnibus edition entitled The Two Moons. In the Introduction, I promised that there would be a companion volume containing the third and fourth titles in the series. It is The Two Worlds, the book that you are now holding. The two titles that it contains were both written during the 1980s, after I had left DEC to become a full-time writer, been granted permanent residency of the United States, and was free to live and work where and when and how I chose.

  I had written two more books during the time I was still with DEC: The Two Faces of Tomorrow and Thrice Upon a Time. After those were done, my thoughts turned back once more to the Giants. The Gentle Giants of Ganymede had ended with a hint that the Giants' Star is not a myth but indeed real and very alive, giving a clear indication of an intended further story to follow. At the end of 1979 I found myself single again, in possession of a car, two suitcases, and a portable typewriter, heading south from Boston for New York, where I was thinking of relocating. I had almost settled on an apartment in a former hotel overlooking Central Park, when I ran into a character called Al, heading the other way—to take a position with my former employer Honeywell, as it turned out—who had lived in what sounded like an identical place, except that it also had a pool, health club, and tennis courts, in Orlando, Florida, for about one sixth the rent. The 2-3 day drive took me about three months; strange things can happen when you're loose, exploring a wonderland like America was—to me, anyway—in the early 1980s. By the time I took an apartment in Altamonte Springs, I had the first draft of Giants' Star finished. It was written in people's kitchens, people's spare rooms, back porches, and motel rooms down the east coast and along the Gulf, and at various circuitous places between. It would be inappropriate to give away too much about it here. Suffice it to say that the Ganymeans who left Earth arrive at the Giants' Star a lot sooner than they expected, and find a thriving civilization on a planet called Thurien. The subsequent opening of direct contact between Thurien and Earth reveals the existence of another branch of the Lunarian race descended from other survivors who were removed to Thurien after Minerva's destruction. Still seeing Terrans as rivals, the "Jevlenese" have been meddling in Earth's history for millennia in anticipation of an eventual day of reckoning, but are exposed through the joint efforts of the Terrans and the Thuriens, with delivery of due come-uppances.

  The fourth book in the series, Entoverse, was written at the latter end of the decade, by which time I was married again, raising three children again—three sons this time, in contrast to the three daughters from my first marriage—and living in California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, about three hours drive inland from San Francisco. The team that we have gotten to know in the first three books arrives at Jevlen, the planet that the Thuriens entrusted to the Jevlenese as their own world, to help investigate a strange craziness that has affected much of the population and resulted in social malaise and general decline. I'll say no more here than that it turns out to be due to one of the strangest alien invasions ever. Along with Giants' Star, it makes up The Two Worlds.

  The fifth Giants novel, Mission to Minerva, was released in May, 2005. Since then I have received many appreciative comments, along with inquiries as to if and when we can expect a sixth. So, although there is nothing definite in the works yet, perhaps we'll see a further title. It certainly appears that we need one to make up a third two-book omnibus to complete what would be a handsome set. In the meantime, I hope that this latest addition to the collection will help keep the Giants alive on the shelves for many more years to come, and introduce them to many new readers.

  James P. Hogan

  County Leitrim, Ireland

  May, 2007

  Giants' Star

  To Jackie

  Prologue

  By the beginning of the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, it seemed that the human race was finally beginning to learn to live together and that it was on its way to the stars. Having abandoned the crippling arms race and disbanded the bulk of their strategic forces, the superpowers were instead pouring their billions into a massive transfer of Western technology and know-how to the nations of the Third World. With the increased wealth and living standards that came universally with global industrialization, and the security and variety that accompanied more affluent life-styles, population became self-limiting, and hunger, poverty, along with most of mankind's other traditional age-old scourges, at last looked as if they were on the brink of being eradicated permanently. While the U.S.-U.S.S.R. rivalry transformed itself into a war of wits and diplomacy for economic and political influence among the stabilizing nation-states, Man's adventure lust found its expression in a revitalized, multinational space program, which burst outward across the solar system in a new wave of exploration and expansion coordinated under a specially formed UN Space Arm. Lunar development and exploitation proceeded rapidly, permanent bases appeared on Mars and in orbit above Venus, and a series of large-scale manned missions reached the outer planets.

  But probably the greatest revolution of the times was the upheaval in science that had followed some of the discoveries made on the Moon and out at Jupiter in the course of these explorations. In the space of just a few years, a series of astonishing discoveries had toppled beliefs unquestioned since the beginnings of science, forced a complete rewriting of the history of the solar system itself, and culminated in Man's first encounter with an advanced alien species.

  A hitherto unknown planet, christened Minerva by the investigators who unraveled its story, had once occupied the position between Mars and Jupiter in the solar system as originally formed, and had been inhabited by an advanced race of eight-foot-tall aliens who came to be known as the "Ganymeans" after the first evidence of their existence came to light on Ganymede, largest of the Jovian moons. The Ganymean civilization, which flourished up until twenty-five million years before the present, vanished abruptly. Some of Earth's scientists believed that deteriorating environmental conditions on Minerva might have forced the "Giants" to migrate to some other star system, but the matter had not been settled conclusively. Much later—some fifty thousand years prior to the current period in Earth's history—Minerva was destroyed. The bulk of its mass, thrown outward into an eccentric orbit on the edge of the solar system, became Pluto. The remainder of the debris was dispersed by Jupiter's tidal effect and formed the Asteroid Belt.

  While the pieces of this puzzle were still being fitted together, a starship from the ancient Ganymean civilization returned. Having undergone a relativistic time dilation that was compounded by a technical problem in the vessel's space-time-distorting drive system, the net result was that an elapsed time of twenty-odd years for the ship corresponded to the passing of something on the order of a million times that number on Earth. The Shapieron had departed from Minerva before the onset of whatever had befallen the rest of the Ganymean race, and its occupants were therefore unable to either confirm or refute the theories of the terrestrial researchers involved with the subject. The Giants stayed for six months, combining their efforts with those of Earth's scientists in a search for more clues and mingling harmoniously into Earth's society. Mankind had found a friend, and the remnants of the Ganymean race had, it was assumed, found a home.

  But it was not to be. Investigations uncovered a hint that the Ganymean civilization had migrated to a star located near the constellation of Taurus—a star that came to be called the "Giants' Star"; there was no guarantee, but there was hope. Shortly afterward the Shapieron departed, leaving behind a sad, but in many ways wiser, world.

  Radio observatories on lunar Farside beamed a signal toward the Giant's Star to forewarn of the Shapieron's coming. Though the signal would take years to cover the distance, it would still arrive well ahead of the ship. To the astonishment of t
he scientists who composed the transmission, a reply purporting to have come from the Giants' Star and confirming that it was indeed the new home of the Ganymeans was received only hours after they first began sending. But by that time the Shapieron had already left, and news of the message could not be relayed to it because of the space-time distortion induced around the craft by its drive, which prevented electromagnetic signals from being received coherently. There was nothing more that the scientists on Earth could do; the Shapieron had vanished back into the void from whence it had come, and many more years of uncertainty would pass before the Ganymeans aboard it would know whether or not their quest was in vain.

  The transmitters on lunar Farside continued sending intermittently during the three months that followed, but no further reply was evoked.

  Chapter One

  Dr. Victor Hunt finished combing his hair, buttoned on a clean shirt, and paused to contemplate the somewhat sleepy-eyed but otherwise presentable image staring back at him from the bathroom mirror. He detected a couple of gray strands here and there among his full head of dark brown waves, but somebody would have had to be looking for them to notice them. His skin had an acceptably healthy tone to it; the lines of his cheeks and jaw were solid and firm, and his belt still rested loosely on his hips to serve its intended purpose of keeping his pants up and not to keep his waistline in. All in all, he decided, he wasn't doing too badly for thirty-nine. The face in the mirror frowned suddenly as the ritual reminded him of a typical specimen of middle-age male wreckage in a TV commercial; all it wanted now was for the mentally defective, bottle-brandishing wife to appear in the doorway behind to deliver the message on baldness cures, body deodorants, remedies for bad breath, or whatever. Shuddering at the thought, he tossed the comb into the medicine cabinet above the sink, closed the door, and ambled through into the apartment's kitchen.