The Fallen World

Kronos - Part 6

     It was a small room, barely six feet by ten, and the five of them had a tight squeeze getting into the tiny area of floor that wasn’t covered by desks, cabinets, a large table and a single high backed chair. Whereas every other item of furniture they’d seen so far in the complex had been bare and empty, though, these ones were covered by great piles of books, ledgers, folders and loose sheets of paper, some stacked neatly but the great majority heaped in chaotic disarray all over every horizontal surface.

     Thomas picked up the topmost sheet of paper, blew the dust off and tried to read it, not easy since the ink had faded almost to invisibility during the centuries since it had been written. “The Empire is falling,” he read, “and many of the great seats of lore, wisdom and knowledge have already been destroyed, the priceless treasures they contained burned like garbage by the new barbarians. I am determined that the same fate shall not befall my own life’s work, or that of my predecessors, and so I have brought all our notes and records, all our theories and speculations, and my entire personal library up here to this timeless moon where, the Gods willing, they will survive the coming dark age and be found by men of learning and wisdom when civilization rises again, as I am confident it will. May Tizar, the source and guardian of all wisdom, watch over this priceless hoard and keep it safe down through the centuries. It’s signed Pottrik Marr, the last Astronomer Imperial.”

     “Priceless hoard?” said Shaun doubtfully, looking around the dusty room.

     “Yes!” exclaimed Thomas emphatically. “It’s obvious when you think of it! Those lenses don’t have to just look down on Tharia, they could just as easily look up at the stars and the other planets. The Emperor must have allowed one or two of the lenses to be used by astronomers, and it’s all up here, two thousand years of astronomical observations. You don’t get much more priceless than that!”

     He picked up a big, thick book and opened it to see every page covered by drawings of Lamon, the next planet in towards the yellow sun, with various changing features such as clouds and dust storms labelled in fading ink. It was labelled ‘Lamon 1152 - 1185’, and looking around he saw dozens of other volumes, each containing twenty or thirty years worth of observations of the same planet. Nearby, other bookshelves contained a similar number of volumes dedicated to the other planets.

     “You’d think they’d get fed up drawing the same thing over and over again for so long,” said Jerry, rather unimpressed. “What’s the point? You draw them once, what’s the point of drawing them again?”

     Good point, thought Thomas. He took two volumes of drawings of Lamon, one from the early days of the Empire and the other from near its end. He opened them both to compare them. “Look!” he exclaimed in excitement. “They’re different. See how those dark areas are small and patchy in this one, but here, in the drawing done nearly a thousand years later, they’ve grown to cover almost the entire hemisphere.”

     “That’s because they were drawn by different artists,” replied the tiny nome. “The second one was probably done with a darker pencil and a heavier hand. Besides, how do you know both drawings are of the same part of the planet?”

     “They’re marked in longitude and latitude,” replied Thomas, showing him. “That’s why they kept observing and drawing for so long, to see how the planets change down through the centuries.”

     “Ah, here you are,” said Matthew, entering behind the others. “I wondered where you’d gone.”

     “Are the trogs okay?” asked Diana.

     “Yeah, they’re fine. They reckon they’ll be through in another couple of hours.”

     “Did you tell them what we found up here?” asked Shaun.