We Found A World Where 10-Foot Giant Aliens Are Walking

On a dead world beyond the last navigation beacons, an alien city is still at work. Ten-foot beings sow fields of dust with empty hands, walk grooves their feet have worn knee-deep into solid rock, and sit on the steps of a great hall with the calmest faces a veteran surveyor has ever seen. Inside that hall stand rows of bone-white frames.

He is here on a black expedition, kept off every record by the nameless men who buy and sell the labor contracts of convicts. Then he watches a frame take hold of the city's...