Gigante - In the Name of the Son

Gigante, twenty thousand times bigger than PrimeEarth, is like an enormous unshining sun. Yet a solid crust has grown up on its surface, like the skin on boiled milk. Abundant oxygen has stimulated the emergence of a varied flora and fauna. Its proportions are impressive: a conventional aircraft would take a century to fly round it without stopping.

A Gigante day lasts two months in standard time (ST). One month of daylight followed by one month of twilight when the twelve moons that orbit Gigante shine with a pale light, that is brighter or not depending on their convergence. There is heavy gravity and new arrivals would be wise to use an exoskeleton to take the pressure off their joints and heart. A long period of adaptation is necessary both for the gravity and for the high levels of oxygen...

Koeb Merticant, an archaeologist in search of mythic giants whose skeletons were discovered several centuries earlier, wakes up from a 40 year long cryogenic sleep in a star ship between Azadée and Gigante. On arrival the Velox passengers learn that propulsion has since made considerable progress so that two years are enough to make the same journey. Furthermore the now obsolete space ship is to be scrapped. So, travellers who left around two years ago have arrived before them...

Another surprise for Koeb: They roll out the red carpet for him because, as he learns, he is the father of a certain Zaslo Merticant who has saved the lives of millions of people by warning them in time of the arrival of a phenomenally powerful electric storm. Koeb didn’t even know that the woman he had abandoned 40 years previously had been pregnant... He has hardly arrived at his hotel when a grandson turns up: Drek Merticant, who confidently demands that they leave together to find his father, who has been untraceable for many years. Even worse, St Saviour’s Church, where Zaslo is idolised, contacts him for the same reason and begs him to accompany an expedition ready and prepared to set out to look for him.

His astonishment turning to curiosity, Koeb agrees to leave for one month (so five years in ST!) with the insolent grandson and the tribe of priests to find a lost god who is supposed to be his son...