The Last Historian

by Grace Bridges -

In the Year 179 A.F. on this thirteenth Day of the month of Celeste.

Gryphon Silt wielded the unfamiliar writing utensil and scratched his malformed letters. Once again the archive computers were down, and no resources could be allocated to fix them. So he began all over. It had happened before, he’d learned from his mentors—the older historians that trained the younger in their days. But now he was the only one, with no student allocated.

Files pertaining to the founding of our proud Colony have been discovered to be corrupted, and so we have taken it upon ourselves to assemble what precious little information remains in the memories of those who had read it most recently.

Our distant foreparents were sent out from the earth in a large ship called the Avenir. Now you may wonder at that, for she orbits the skies of Eclectia still. But she has been modified to serve as an orbiting station, and seen many enlargements since.

Gryphon peered up at the murky water on the other side of the ceiling. The sun would rise soon on a summer day, not that it made any difference to him. In here the constant temperature created a stable, safe environment. He had taken a seawalk once, but once was enough.

Contact has always been maintained between the water people and the Avenir itself. When we had lived in the seas for a short while, we began to send reports of the creatures of the deep which we had the opportunity to encounter and study. Some reports claimed the beasts were telepathic, and sentient, and that some were benevolent and others aggressive. While this has never been scientifically proven, it has lodged in Eclectia’s folklore and is even considered true by some of the more eccentric scientists on the Avenir.

Now that more generations have come and gone, there is a certain segregation between Avenir’s people and the planetsiders. Down below are the miners and hunters, living on the land wherever it stays still long enough. Below them again are the sea-dwellers, who continue to investigate their environment as they build ever more efficient survival tools. Life in the underwater cities is surely almost as luxurious as on the Avenir.

Those who must stay on the land to mine its treasures have little contact with the Avenir, from necessity. They retrieve the ore that generates power for the Avenir and the underwater cities as well as their own settlements. It must be said that these are rough types who consider themselves the only true colonists of Eclectia.

The historian stared at the page. Was this all there was left? He dredged his memory for any flake of remembrance, any piece of what had gone before.

A shadow passed over the room. Gryphon squinted upwards and thought he recognised Mac’s sub coming in. He threw down the pen—a drink with his friend might just help to jog his brain.