Hunt said nothing but leaned forward to peer closely at the charts. This was fascinating-a record of the skies as they had appeared when the Lunanian civilization had been at its peak, immediately prior to its catastrophic fall. As Maddson had said, all the familiar constellations were there, but changed subtly from those seen in modern~times. The other thing that made them difficult to identify were the sets of lines drawn all over the charts to interconnect groups of the more prominent stars into patterns and shapes that bore no resemblance to the familiar constellations; the lines tended to draw the eye along unfamiliar paths and obscure the better-known patterns. Orion, for example, was there, but not connected up as a single, intact configuration; part of it was grouped independently into a subset, while the other part was separated from the rest of Orion and linked to the normally distinct parallelogram of Lepus to form something else instead. The result was that it took time to identify the two parts of Orion and mentally fuse them back together again to reveal that Orion was there at all.
“I see,” Hunt observed thoughtfully at last. “They saw pictunes in the stars just like we do, only they saw different ones. Takes a while to get used to, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah-interesting, huh?” Maddson agreed. “They not only saw different shapes; they grouped the stars differently too. That doesn’t really come as a surprise though; I’ve always said there
was more dog in the mind of the beholder than there ever was in Canis Major. Still, it’s interesting to see that their minds seemed to work the same way. . . even if they were every bit as susceptible to autosuggestion.”
“What’s this?” Hunt inquired after a few more seconds. He indicated a pattern that lay over toward the left-hand side of the chart he had been studying. The Lunarians had formed a large constellation by connecting together Hercules, Serpens, Corona Borealis and part of Boötes to produce a starfish-shaped pattern. The English translation of its name read simply The Giant.
“I wondered if you’d spot that one,” Maddson said, nodding in approval. “Well, as we know, the Lunarians knew all about the Ganymeans having been there before them. I guess they musta kinda named one of their constellations . . . sort of in honor of them, or something like that.” He swept a hand over the chart to take in the whole extent of it. “As you can see, they named their constellations after all kinds of things, but mainly after animals just like we did. I suppose it must be a natural tendency in some kind of way.” He pointed back at the one Hunt had picked out. “If you’re the imaginative kind, you can see something in that which vaguely suggests the Ganymean form . . . it does to me anyhow. I mean. . . in Hercules you can see the head and the two arms raised up. . . Serpens forms a slightly flexed leg trailing back . . . and then the lines through Corona Borealis and then down to Arcturus give you the other leg. See what I mean? It sorta looks like a figure running or leaping.”
“It does, doesn’t it,” Hunt agreed. His eyes held a faraway look for a moment, then he went on: “I’ll tell you something else this tells us, Don: The Lunanians knew about the Giants very early in their history too-not just later on after they discovered the sciences.”
“How d’you figure that?”
“Well, look at the names that they’ve given to all their constellations. As you said, they’re all simple, everyday things-animals and so on. Those are the kinds of names that a simple and primitive people would think up. . . names that come from the things they see in the world around them. We got our names for our constellations in exactly the same way.”
“You mean that these names were handed down from way back,” Maddson said. “Through the generations . . . from the
early times when the Lunarians were just starting to think about getting civilized. Yeah, I suppose you could be right.” He paused to think for a second. “I see what you mean now. . . . The one~ they called The Giant was probably named at about the same time as the rest. The rest were named while the Lunarians were still primitive, so The Giant was named while they were still primitive.