The Fallen World

Kronos - Part 6

     “No,” said Matthew, grinning. “I told them to come get us when they get through. I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when they see the world through that window!”

     The others all grinned at the thought, then filed back out to return to the observation room, leaving Thomas all alone. The wizard barely noticed they’d gone as he pulled out another book, a look of sheer bliss on his face. This was Thomas’s idea of paradise. Being surrounded by the accumulated wisdom of centuries and being left alone to read it in peace, and as he discovered that the book contained words rather than pictures, being a summary of everything that was known about the planet Sereena, he could almost imagine that he’d died and gone to heaven.

     He read blissfully for a few minutes, before gradually becoming aware of a wonderful fragrance coming from somewhere behind him. A sweet, fresh smell so indescribably wonderful that he looked around to see what it was, and almost bumped his head against Lirenna’s, who’d been reading over his shoulder and inadvertently breathing almost directly into his face.

     “Oh, sorry,” he stammered in embarrassment, “I didn’t see you there. I thought you’d gone with the others.”

     “I did, but I came back,” replied the demi shae. She reached across him to pick up another book, a much thinner one filled with columns of numbers. “Guest stars,” she read on the cover. “What are they?”

     “A star that suddenly appears where there wasn’t one before,” replied Thomas. “They shine for a few days, weeks or months and then fade out again. Some are so bright they can be seen in the daytime.”

     “Really? Where do they come from?”

     “No-one knows. Some sages say that they’re ordinary stars that are so far away that they’re too dim to see, but which suddenly become brighter for some reason. If that’s true, imagine if it happened to a star that was already bright. It would be like having a third sun!”

     Lirenna’s eyes widened in fascination, but the columns of numbers failed to hold her interest for long and she picked up another book. “Variations in the diameter of Derro,” she read. It was also filled with columns of numbers, but on the first page was a folded graph three feet long on which they’d been plotted, diameter against time. Their University education had included a very brief series of lectures on the basic principles of mathematics, so that she was able to read the graph.

     “Tom, look at this,” she said after a few minutes, and because of the strange tone in her voice he put down the book he’d been reading to look. The graph consisted of a wavy line that went up and down with about fifty years between one peak and the next, but it also had a slight, general downward slope so that the end of the graph was noticeably lower than the start, a thousand years earlier.

     “By the Gods!” he exclaimed. “So Derro’s getting smaller, is it? But very, very slowly, over centuries.” He stared off into the distance for a few moments, deep in thought. “So if you extrapolate that graph back into the past, you’d see Derro getting larger and larger until, tens of thousands of years ago, it would have been enormous. Lenny, do you remember that time when we were in the Ghost Ocean?”

     The demi shae shuddered. She remembered all too well. “What about it?” she asked.

     “We saw an image of the world as it was two or three million years ago,” said Thomas, “but do you remember, we couldn’t see the image of the red sun of the past. Strange, don’t you think?”

     “I think it’s dangerous to extrapolate too far into the past,” warned the demi shae. “We’re talking about hundreds of years here, not millions.”