Chapter 19 - The Inevitable Date
Adam was almost finished with breakfast when he heard a hoof knock on the lander’s window. The shutter slithered open, and he saw the gray wall-eyed mare, making her postal rounds. Usually she didn’t stop by until later in the day, since he lived so far outside of town – so this must’ve been important.
“Qapata!” she greeted him. She held up a manila-colored envelope to the window.
He nodded. “Wõ sehe þesơ cupavu,” he told her, pointing to the sterile locker. Ever since he got Ãtir’s books inside, the locker had been relegated to a makeshift mailbox. She knew to place items inside and to close the door, but never seemed to remember to sterilize them.
Such as now. As she flew away, Adam rolled his eyes and did the last step for her. He hit the switch for her inside, and stood by the window. Any minute now, he knew, Ãtir Ḷsapa would show up at the window as well. He couldn’t say precisely which time, but it was clearly scheduled.
Two minutes passed, and the locker was finished. Since Ãtir seemed to be running late, he decided to kill the time with. . . whatever this was. He pulled the envelope out and unsealed it. There weren’t any words that he could read – only mathematical definitions. But all these photographs were clearly biological in nature. Adam realized this was from the hospital in the fortress-city. They had completed what should be an initial analysis of the effects of breaching biosegregation.
While he couldn’t make heads or tails of it, he knew someone who could. “Zulu-Alfa, this is Tango-1,” he opened on the radio. “Is Dr. Weiss on station? Over.”
“This is Weiss,” her voice replied within the moment. “Receiving, over.”
“Just now I have received documents from the hospital laboratory,” he told her. “I will be transmitting scans of them to you at this time. Please acknowledge, over.”
“Copy Somerset, standing by.”
With that settled, he swung the camera over the document, and one by one started snapping photographs of the pages. Each of them was transmitted to Zodiac-Altair without delay. He worked quickly, yet neatly, to make sure she could see them all before Ãtir came to drag him away.
Speak of the Devil – right as he snapped the final page, he heard a pop! outside, and hooves hitting the scaffolding. “Hello, Adam,” she greeted him in accented English. “Are you ready?”
“Almost ready,” he replied. As he photographed the last page, he breathed a sigh of relief, then climbed into his suit. With this, he hoped he wouldn’t have to test any more samples with the probe. So far, they had tested a variety of fruits and vegetables – at least, all the ones that the Indigenous considered to be edible. They also tested other sources – things the equines could not eat, such as other plants and even meat. He remembered finding some tomato analogues here, and even though those had proved nonviable for human consumption, they were clearly cultivated by the ponies. He chuckled – he remembered Dr. Weiss’s fit from orbit; apparently Terrestrial horses could not handle nightshades like tomatoes. From what Adam remembered as well, between his initial findings and his subsequent studies with Ãtir, carnivorous sentients lived on Rhysling, and regularly interacted with the equines. However, he had yet to met a single one of them here in Ơhesti.
Ơhesti – that was the name of the large political body to which Ãtir, Sulfoyarqa, and all the other equines pledged their allegiance. Their rulers, Yere Kisữ and Yara Ariman, were testing him, seeing if he was fit to remain in Ơhesti. From what he noted, apparently all of Ơhesti revered them as living gods. I could see why, he remembered thinking at the time – I certainly haven’t found anyone quite like the two.
Not to mention, he further learned, they were sisters, and were the literal living embodiments of the Sun and Moon. He asked Ãtir how that worked – and she responded that they had direct control over the two celestial bodies. Adam sooner believed Yara Ariman’s control over the Moon than Yere Kisữ’s over the Sun. For one, that went directly against the heliocentric model they had apparently also adopted. For another, it also went directly against Kepler’s findings about gravity. Unless there’s something else at play here? Adam remembered masked skepticism, though he tried to respect Ơhesti’s belief system. Still, he wanted to see it happen firsthand.
She was surprisingly understanding of the whole thing, and decided to take Adam directly to the capitol city – which he learned also was called Kãtṛlat – even paying for the two tickets out of her own pocket. Adam wanted to pay her back for the convenience, but she refused. Is this her attempt at evangelizing me? he wondered. Still, he reserved his judgment until the train pulled into Kãtṛlat. It was early in the evening when he got there, and therefore the sun had not yet set. A perfect time, he supposed, to watch the two sisters at work.
Sisters. Right. Of course they would be. Two opposing celestial bodies, being so closely related to one another – one for day, one for night – one for light, one for dark – one for good, one for evil? He bit his tongue to avoid making the suggestion at the time. As the city’s clock struck the top digit – six, no, ten – he watched the events unfold before his eyes: first, Yere Kisữ flew up to the top of the sky, up to where she nearly left Adam’s field of vision. Then she lit her horn, and he started noticing the glimmers of the Sun start to shift to red, deeper and deeper as it descended over the western horizon. She kept descending with the sun, slowly yet surely, keeping pace with the celestial body itself. At the same time, meanwhile, Yara Ariman started ascending herself at the same pace as her sister, horn lit as well, bringing up the moon over the eastern horizon.
He couldn’t explain it, even now – he wasn’t a theoretical physicist. He was certain, however, that Zodiac-Altair had at least one packed away somewhere, meant likely to assist with reverse-engineering alien technology should the need arise. And judging by what he saw, that was surely going to be handy for them at some point. For the time being, however, Adam simply wrote off the entire experience as an elaborate ritual meant to legitimize the sisters’ reign.
The ride back home – to Ginzol, which he overheard from the conductor – was largely uneventful, even if they arrived at midnight. Adam knew Ãtir could easily have teleported him back to the lander – hell, even teleported him out of his suit and into the lander itself – but that posed a few problems. For one, he still didn’t know how the teleportation technology they used would affect human physiology. He noted no effect when they were nearby, but who could say the same for doing it at a considerable distance? For another, he was teleported while wearing a spacesuit. What if he was naked? These were the thoughts that kept him up at night, despite it not being his own department.
Time he spent all the same working on translating Ơhqer into English, despite Ãtir’s protests to the contrary. He would attempt to get another hour or two into the day, but she would always catch on, and always chastise him – in English, even – for staying up for so long. What are you, my mother? She meant well at least.
“Adam?” Ãtir asked him. “You’re quiet now. Is something wrong?”
“Hm?” He looked down at the violet unicorn. “No, nothing’s wrong, Ãtir.” He breathed into his suit deeply. “Will we go study now?” he asked her. He wasn’t worried about work – he’d checked the place early in the morning, only to find that it was closed for the day.
“Yes!”
With that, Adam disconnected from the suitport, and he and Ãtir started down the road, side-by-side with each other.
For most other equines, such a task seemed boring, dreary, something to be loathed as a necessary evil. Not Ãtir, for whatever reason. She reveled in such a task – it meant discovery, exploration, wonder. This attitude suited Adam quite well – she took to English like a champ, devouring all the words he could think of. She even took the time to memorize all the irregularities of its creolized grammar. Why, she even started developing an American accent, independent of his teaching. Is she trying to show off for me? he often wondered between his marveling.
Unfortunately, Adam was languishing in his studies of Ơhqer. He wanted to learn it, with just as much zeal as his equine colleague, but his approach was just far too methodical to immerse himself fully into the grammar. He wanted to learn not just which roots and affixes went together, which roots fitted which definitions, but why they did so. At the same time, he focused on drafting a practical phrasebook for the colony, ensuring colonists could survive in Ơhesti’s society. And even with Ãtir’s English lexicon as large and rapidly-growing as it was, even she couldn’t come up with a proper, fitting explanation for these roots and affixes.
It was a maddening issue, but one he had to tolerate.
As he entered Ginzol, he noticed that very few ponies were out and about in the streets – that was, until he approached the central square, where the residents of Ginzol were holding their weekly market. No thanks, he wanted to say, I don’t want any carrots; I’ve already tested those. Njeledirve, please, I’ve already tested a whole bushel of apples that you gifted me; they all returned the same results, or so Dr. Weiss said. It was a lot of offers to, and silent refusals from, the human – but it all did mean one thing: they had started accepting him as one of their own. It was as much as he could ask for – if they were willing to accept him, then surely they might be more willing to accept other human beings as well.
Not to mention that Ħṛylilufa managed to work past her initial bias and not knock him down again. Oh, yes, that was another thing – despite being united politically as one body, the three types of equines he had seen had developed their own specific dialects. Admittedly, he had also been influenced slightly by Ãtir’s specific dialect – if only because he came to learn that Yere Kisữ and Yara Ariman also had that same dialect, even with the latter’s broken speech, though a few mannerisms on their part all but convinced him that they had a personal dialect of their own. He would have to inquire at some point.
It was the unicorn dialect that had those tricky voiceless nasals and palatal laterals, and he was glad that he didn’t have to imitate those precisely for them to understand him. As he had suspected earlier, the voiceless nasals were nasal clicks in the other two dialects, to which he took quite easily. The palatal lateral was really an elision of the sequence [jl], though it took him a few days for that to click.
There were a few more differences between dialects – for one, the pegasi never had a null onset, whereas other dialects did allow those. The pegasi insist on using [ɦ], a sound he had not anticipated from the textbook on that night. He had to improvise johnny-on-the-spot to use ħ for that sound. Naturally, he’d drop it from the colony language lessons, reserving it for those who truly needed to know.
After a brisk walk through town, they arrived at the tree-library. Elzơ, her dragon assistant, was waiting for them already, books already in hand. Adam took them into his own arms – “Thank you,” he said reflexively. Oops!
But it was such a common enough phrase spoken in English that he responded with “You’re welcome!” before leaving the room entirely, leaving him alone with Ãtir. As he sat down on the floor, she took her usual place in his lap. He couldn’t feel it, but these equines were apparently warm-blooded, just like humans. Even Elzơ, too – against all his expectations. His reptilian appearance made him assume he was cold-blooded. But then, he realized, I haven’t seen him spend a lot of time in the sun. I guess he doesn’t need it?
He opened the book, and saw it was all about time. He realized he could learn more about how Rhyslingers kept the time, and more importantly, the date. He flipped the book open, without her prompting, to the first few pages. They were all about how time was told within the day – hours, minutes, and half-days. Strangely, there weren’t anything on seconds. Adam raised an eyebrow. “Why not seconds?” he asked.
“What is ‘seconds’?” Ãtir of course would ask.
“Seconds is. . . .” How do I define it for her? After some thought, he remembered the pocketwatches in the shop at Kãtṛlat. “Fast hand, tick, tick, tick, tick. . . .” Please understand it.
“Ah!” She nodded. “Seconds! We do not use seconds usually. Only if one is strict about keeping time.” That, or the book was printed before those were adopted. “Most of us use. . . .” She tapped her hoof upon the smallest unit upon the page – what he knew to be minutes.
“Minutes,” he told her. Then he pointed out the next largest unit on the page with his finger. “. . . and hours.”
“Minute! Hour!” she echoed back to him. “Yes!” She cleared her throat and translated them: “Ayadal. . . izãdal.” Then she paused – and pointed at the remaining unit on the spread. “What is this?”
Adam didn’t have an answer. Sure, he had the words ‘day’ and ‘night,’ but no word to describe both of them as equal measures of time, not like what Rhysling had – or at least Ơhesti. “We don’t have the word,” he told her, in full honesty.
“Kãtṛtal,” Ãtir pronounced for him. “We call it the kãtṛtal.”
And indeed, when Adam looked more closely, he saw the neat alphasyllabary printing, void of any serifs, spelling out kã-tṛ-ta-l. As he had learned, there indeed were vowel and consonant harmonies, but they only needed to be marked on the first non-neutral syllable. So only ka took on the horizontal line inside the letter – and were the word kẽtṛtel instead, it would not have the moon-vowel marking above kã. Even with all the roots he knew, Adam couldn’t detect any obvious etymology – so either it was a loanword from a language he had not yet studied, or this division of time was so ancient in their culture it had its own dedicated root.
“Let’s turn the page!” Ãtir said – and in her telekinetic grip, she grabbed the leaf and turned it over. This one was about more divisions of time, containing days within a year.
A local calendar! Adam drank in the page. Using as many English terms as he could think of, he noted that Rhysling worked on nine months instead of twelve, each with thirty-six days spread across six weeks, each with six days. But he noticed an odd quirk – each day was indicated with a numeral. That in and of itself wasn’t unusual – that was how the modern Chinese calendar worked, for instance – but the numerals were different. They were like dice pips, but instead of being arranged like on dice, as he had seen before, here they were stacked up into triangles. It was one pip for the first day, then two pips, one pip on top of two, then three pips with a fourth stacked atop on the left side, two pips on top of three – then where he expected one pip on two on three, there instead was another symbol – one he never seen before. This was the symbol for their money, or dege. It looked like a de and ge nested within each other, in an S-like configuration. This marked the last day of each week, which were also indicated in green. The sabbath, he wanted to say, but that would be too Christian, not to mention it might not actually be a day of rest for them per se. Regardless, it was a significant day – although Adam did not know its nature quite yet.
What better way than to ask? He tapped his finger on the green day. “What is this day used for?” he asked Ãtir.
“That is xurakisũ,” she explained. “It is the day when we sell at market.”
Market-day, he realized – though that might not be the most literal translation; he recognized the root for ‘sell,’ xura, added onto the root for ‘day,’ kisữ. “Is it also the day for rest?” he asked. Just want to be sure.
“Yes, for some of us,” she replied. “But not for all of us. Some of us sell. Some of us buy. Some of us rest.”
Maybe I’ve earned my day off from the clerk. Adam could already hear the colonists start to complain of only getting one day of the week off. But hey, he thought, better that than to have to work all six days of the week. Plus, it’s actually compatible with the five-day working week we have. Always gotta see the bright side of things.
Adam spotted some specific dates on the calendars, likely indicating holidays, festivals, and the like – but he wasn’t thinking about those at the moment. Seasons – what about those on Rhysling? Do the equines observe them? Surely they must, if they can farm crops of plants. “What do you do during the months?” he asked her.
“Kipþaq, we plant seeds. Ṛljiman, we let the rain come and go. Silaþaq, the crops start to green.” Strange verb, but I can visualize it all the same. “Djugaman, the flowers open. Gegemen, we harvest the crops. Xaþaþaq – ” a word heavy with clicks – “we burn what we cannot harvest. It will make the ground good for next Kipþaq. Izazaman, we celebrate the harvest, as the first. . . .” Stuck on a word, Ãtir? “Snow comes. When the first snow comes. Ariman, the days are short and the nights are long.” Ah, so even the days and nights vary somewhat, just as we do on Earth. Wait, isn’t that the name of one of their leaders!? “Kṛsjãþaq, the ground is still too cold to green any crops. It goes back to Kipþaq after.”
Adam could easily guess the literal meaning of each of the words. He knew enough roots for all these words. A kip was a seed, ṛlji was rain – though he would prefer ṛyli, as ṛlji was highly dialectal – sila was the color green, and all things associated with it, djuga was a flower, blossom, and all other similar structures, gege was a verb ‘to harvest,’ xaþa was fire, izaza was a party or a festival – the word made no distinction as to scale, as he found out from Njilidi Njibi – ari was night, and kṛsjã was snow. All of them, invariably, were attached to the root for ‘moon,’ man – implying this was a lunar calendar.
Seasonal divisions were strange – there were either three seasons lasting three months each, or four seasons lasting two months each, except for winter, which lasted three either way. But hey, at least the calendar is perennial, he thought. And there’s no ‘Thirty Days Hath September’ nonsense. But what if they have leap days? “Are the months always the same every year?” he asked her.
“Yes, every year!” she confirmed.
“Do you not have another day some years?”
“I don’t understand.” She looked back at him, tilting her head. “The months are always the same every year. Why would we have another day some years?”
Adam was about to launch into a lecture about the rotation of the planets not being precisely whichever number of days they had calculated – 324 in decimal, 1300 in senary – but even he would have to admit, with all the quirks the Julian and Gregorian calendars had to ensure they lined up with Earth’s tropical year, they both did their jobs. If, as she asserted, Rhysling’s orbital period was so perfect that one could construct a calendar that did not need any intercalation, then that much could help him, and the rest of the crew, adjust to Rhysling with few issues. After all, if NASA had already calculated a calendar for working on Mars, then adopting Rhysling’s calendar shouldn’t be too much of a hassle for them.
Speaking of years. . . . Adam’s eyes darted up to a five-figure digit printed at the top of the calendar. So they do number years, just like in the west, he noticed, but from what event? Regardless, it was the eighteenth day of Djugaman, year thirty-one thousand, two hundred thirty-two. Converted to decimal, it was the year 4196. They must’ve been counting for a while, he concluded.
They continued exploring the book in the meantime. The next page spread was about the seasons. To answer that question, it was the latter hypothesis – they had a spring, summer, and autumn of two months each, and a winter with three. At least, that would be true in the northern hemisphere, he reminded himself. “‘Seasons,’” he pronounced for her. Then, pointing them out one by one, “‘Spring’. . . ‘summer’. . . ‘fall’. . . ‘winter.’” Going off the order Ãtir introduced the seasons, they must observe the new year with the start of spring.
“Es-pring – ” she had trouble with English consonant clusters, which were much more complex than Ơhqer’s – “summer, fall, winter,” she repeated back to Adam. But then she asked, “But isn’t ‘fall’ for. . . ?” Then she demonstrated the verb, collapsing herself on the floor.
Adam burst out laughing. “Fall of the leaf,” he clarified.
“Oh.” After righting herself in his lap, she recited in the same order, “Sḷsẽqele, fasḷqala, azlanala, ẽrenele.” Literally, ‘wet sky,’ ‘hot sky,’ ‘dry sky,’ and ‘cold sky.’ To him, they made logical sense, but the words themselves didn’t quite roll off the tongue as easily as the English equivalents, which had only one or two syllables each. Then again, English’s phonotactics allowed those words to exist – Ơhqer didn’t have that luxury. “What’s your favorite season?” she then asked Adam.
Haven’t lived here for long enough to answer for Rhysling, but I can answer for Earth at least. “Summer,” he replied. “Fasḷqala.”
She nodded in understanding.
But before she could turn the page, there was still one question left on his mind. “What is today?”
Ãtir had to pop out of his lap for a moment to check the calendar. “It is the firsty-eighth day of Djugaman.”
“Eighteenth,” he corrected.
She grumbled. “Eighteenth.” She followed up with a sigh. “Why can it not be firsty-eighth?”
“I don’t know, Ãtir. I don’t know.” The last day of the third week, he figured – which was why he ran into the market on his way to the library.
Then she turned the page – to show the times of day: morning, midday, afternoon, evening, and nighttime. Well, those were the English distinctions. Here, they had just the four, combining midday and afternoon. Pick one, pick one, pick one. . . noon! “Morning, noon, evening, night,” he indicated, pointing to each one in succession.
“Morning, noon, evening, night,” she copied him. Then: “Welze, gele, ãtir, ari.”
Wait, isn’t that her name!? “But you are Ãtir,” he said.
She giggled. “So is that!” She pointed at the picture of the evening scene again. “My mother named me that, because that was the time I was born.”
That’s adorable. “Does everyone have that name?” he followed up. “From the time they are born?”
She shook her head. “No.” Must be a special case for her, then. Then she asked something he didn’t anticipate: “Any other words?”
Um. . . . “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Welze is morning. Welze is also dawn. Are they the same?”
Wait, I taught her both of those words? he realized. Oh boy. . . . “Yes,” he would admit eventually. I’m sure there are finer nuances, but those would have their own synonyms, and then we’d be here all day!
“What about for ãtir?” she followed up with. “Other words like ‘evening’?”
Let me see. . . gotta be a bunch of synonyms for the sight of the sun going down at the end of the day. . . “Sunset, dusk, twilight, nightfall – why do you ask?”
But Ãtir was busying herself with sounding out each of those words to herself – softly, so he couldn’t hear her. Eventually, he thought he could hear her repeat one word in particular. “Twilight,” she finally said aloud. “I like that word.” She turned around to face Adam. “Will you call me Twilight?”
I mean, it is a suitably-artistic calque. . . . “Sure, Twilight,” he said.
·–
“. . . scheiss, chuum z glaube,” Elena voiced to herself. “Das chan ächt nöd sii.” She nudged herself away from her terminal, pinching the bridge of her nose. She took a deep breath in, then let it out calmly, as she tried to recollect her sanity. She took another look at the screen, just to make sure what she saw was indeed correct. Once she understood them, she called down the ship, “Commander!”
“What?” she heard his voice echo up through the ship.
“Come to the bridge at once!” she shouted. “I have great news!”
“What sort of news?” Anton’s voice chimed in. “Is it something I have to see as well?”
She giggled. “You may as well; come here also!”
She didn’t have very long to wait until both Dr. Konstantinov, and then Commander Darcy, leapfrogged off the wall and into the bridge. “Over here!” she further said, gesturing them to the screen.
“Have you found something, Weiss?” the commander asked. “These just look like biological charts. Did Somerset send those?”
“He did,” she confirmed. “Apparently the equines at the hospital laboratory have been working on the same solution that I have – they simply have the advantage of physical testing.”
“At the cost of possible contamination,” added Dr. Konstantinov. “Still, what did they find?”
“As it turns out,” she explained, “many Rhyslinger proteins and nutrients are compatible with us human beings.” She sighed. “It’s not ideal, and it would need selective breeding for us, so we should stick to what we’ve brought with us for the time being.”
He nodded. “Understood.”
“Pardon my thoughts, but how do we know this for sure?” Dr. Konstantinov asked. “We haven’t done any of the work ourselves – only taking it from their word, whom,” he hastily added, “we do not know for sure are telling the truth. To say nothing on how fast they came to such a conclusion.”
She snapped her fingers. “They appear to understand as well as we do that, if contamination should prove harmful, they should take every measure to prevent it. Lying about it being safe is the very last thing they’d want to do – if anything, they’d lie about it being unsafe.”
“Bacteria? Fungus? Anything that could attack us on a larger scale?” The Russian started sounding flustered.
“That was towards the end of the document, but it appears that Rhyslinger bacteria do not recognize Terrestrial biology as. . . well, anything.” She rubbed her eye – fatigue was starting to overcome her, despite her initial excitement. “As for fungus, they pose no greater threat than ours do – or to them. Just wash up when coming inside, and that would be that.”
The commander nodded, a smile playing across his face. “I knew the labcoats made the right call recruiting you,” he said – “never thought we’d use their labcoats as well!” He snapped his fingers. “So, putting that all together, does that mean – ”
“Yes, sir – yet!” She held her finger up. “Even with all this knowledge of Rhyslinger life, there is still a risk of disembarking, even from causes none of us know about.”
“Even so, I’m sure our dear Somerset would be glad to hear the news. Damned thing must be getting stuffy for him, not to mention the joints might be wearing out as well.” He pushed himself off the wall and to the radio, grabbing it as he arrived. “Somerset, this is Zulu-Alfa,” he opened. “Dr. Weiss has determined at last that the surface of Rhysling may be safe for human exploration after all, even without suits. You can breathe its air, its microörganisms appear impossible to interact with, and now, it’s likely we can rely on some local consumables.” He smirked, even though he knew Dr. Somerset would never see it. “What do you say, Adam – want to step out of that suit one last time? Please acknowledge so I can transmit the isolation override, over.”
·–·––
Adam had only progressed a bit in his studies. For one, he also learned that Twilight’s last name, Ḷsapa, implied a shower of stars. English equivalents were aplenty, thanks to its poëtic traditions, but she ultimately settled on ‘sparkle.’ Something about the sp consonant cluster pleased her, despite being difficult to pronounce for her at first – she kept pronouncing it ‘asparkle’ a few times – but she kept it all the same.
“Why?” he had to ask.
“‘Sp’ – it’s very English,” she simply explained.
Adam wanted to object – that such consonant clusters were common to the Indo-European family – but that would be another all-day lecture, and he was simply not in the mood for that. And then there’s the Kartvelian family. . . .
And then he remembered a question he had earlier, but had neglected to ask until now. “I know you say ‘ãtir,’” he said. “But do you also say ‘antir’?”
Twilight burst out laughing. “Yes, yes we do!” She kept at it for a good moment, before she tried catching her breath. “Both words are in Ơhqer – and they mean two different things.”
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no. . . . “Is that bad?” he cautiously followed up.
She tilted her head. “No? Why would it be? You simply didn’t know the difference.”
“Not really.” He shrugged. “So if ‘ãtir’ means ‘twilight,’ what does ‘antir’ mean?” Please don’t be vulgar. . . .
Instead of speaking, Twilight decided to show him instead. She lit her horn, and a book’s spine also developed a similar glow. It slid out of the shelf and opened itself in front of her, pages fluttering by at a blinding pace – until it suddenly stopped at one particular spread. She turned around to show him a group of animals – clearly ones the Indigenous had domesticated. A small wooden pointer also introduced itself in a violet glow, and tapped the page. “This is andir,” she announced – while also correcting his pronunciation.
Wait. . . all this time, I’ve been calling her – !? As that thought sank into his mind, he found himself speechless – before he too burst out laughing. She must’ve been thinking I was blind or something! “I’m so sorry, Twilight!” he briefly got out. “I didn’t realize!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she reässured him. “I just thought it was a silly mistake. I don’t mind it at all!” And once he got over his jollies, she followed up with “But what is andir in English?”
He cleared his throat. “Cat.”
“Cat,” she echoed back. “Cat, cat, cat.”
Suddenly the two were interrupted out of the blue with another transmission from the skies. “Somerset, this is Zulu-Alfa,” Commander Darcy opened the broadcast. “Dr. Weiss has determined at last that the surface of Rhysling may be safe for human exploration, even without suits. You can breathe its air, its microörganisms appear to be impossible to interact with, and now, it’s likely we can rely on local consumables.”
As he was saying this, both Adam and Twilight could clearly hear his words – the latter suddenly dropping the book, startled by the vocal interruption from the suit. As more news trickled in from orbit, Adam started to feel his heartbeat start to rise from a mixture of excitement and nervousness. Twilight had to put her ear up to his helmet to get a better idea of what Louis was saying – Adam had long since gotten used to staring down her ear canal. Even so, he could hear her quake in giddiness in his lap, tapping her shod hooves upon the titanium exterior, and he had to scoot her onto the floor so he could hear the call.
“What do you say, Adam,” the commander concluded – “want to step out of that suit one last time? Please acknowledge so I can transmit the isolation override, over.”
Adam looked down at Twilight. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this moment,” he said. “Seeing if it was possible to survive here. Now? Now we know we can.” He sighed. “Still, it leaves the question about surviving with you – but that is for another day.”
“Let’s go to Sulfoyarqa’s house,” Twilight suggested. “She would like to see you outside of your suit.”
A shame she couldn’t be there at the hospital in Kãtṛlat, he mused. Still, I think this is a suitable makeup – abandoning the Strauss is not something she would want to miss.
“Sure,” he said. “But first, let me get my clothes, please.”
“Just a moment.” She lit her horn again, charging up a great amount of energy. He recognized it as a teleportation spell, but something about it was different. But what? A moment later, he had his answer: she was seeking out the very thing he wanted, and yanked it out of his lander. His international-orange jumpsuit floated in front of him, fully encased in violet sparkling light. “It is clean-clean, don’t worry,” she told him – using a term she had coined to mean ‘sterile.’ “Let’s go!”
··
The trip through town was relatively calm – what with the residents trading at the market, or simply resting on such a fine Xurakisũ. Even though Adam had his jumpsuit draped over his shoulder, noöne they ran into even batted an eye – perhaps they were just too used to whatever strange things he had brought with him.
What did catch their attention, truth be told, was the two conversing in English – done in public for the first time. Adam wanted to practice his Ơhqer, but Twilight was much too eager to speak anything other than English. The two went back and forth about various things about Ơhqer, so it wasn’t time wasted for him per se.
Eventually they settled on a story – more specifically, the story about the origin of the script. It was a simple one, almost like a myth, although Adam had long learned not to discount such stories as mere myth and legend. As he listened, he started to visualize the scene unfold, and could conclude that all of it was plausible.
There once was a normal equine, a gardener named Zenedjưge – after Twilight described what the word meant, he chose to translate the name as Wisteria. Apparently Rhysling’s biology did boast such plants, which the equines cultivated – not for food, but for ornamentation. They were difficult to maintain, due to their parasitic nature.
One day, Wisteria got caught in a sudden and rather heavy thunderstorm, and she had to run and stay indoors during the ordeal. Adam noted she used the word ‘unforeseen’ instead of ‘unplanned’ – even when he explained the difference, she insisted. Must be before they harnessed the weather, he surmised.
When the storm started to clear, Wisteria got back to work. As she had noted, the ground was soaking wet and muddy, with all the insects and worms crawling out and around – more parallels with his native Earth. She forgot to wear her boots, having taken them off indoors while she waited out the storm, so she got her hooves and legs muddy.
Those boots also had another purpose: protecting the sensitive parts of their hooves from stray twigs, thorns, and the like. Adam knew there was a word for that part of the hoof, but it just didn’t come to mind. Putting that thought aside, he listened as the story continued – just as he had feared, she got poked by a stray twig on the ground. She lifted it away to check for damage – of which there was none, thankfully. But as she looked down, she saw her hoofprint, framing the twig, now pressed as well into the mud.
And something clicked.
Twilight had to stop and clarify something. Before this moment, Ơhqer was not united by a single writing system – two of the three member tribes, the pegasi and unicorns, each had their own unique writing system. Adam knew this was something to look into when he had a moment, but was not top priority at this time. Each one was adapted to the chief defining feature of these tribes – the pegasi wrote with their wings, and the unicorns wrote with long metal rods, held in place with their telekinesis. And yes, she answered his question, some unicorns did write with molted pegasi feathers.
And as for the regular equines? They never did develop their own script. Certainly some of them were trained to read the pegasi or unicorn scripts, but they themselves never wrote anything. And why not? All they had were their hooves, and their mouth – the latter they took full advantage of, developing a rich oral history instead of writing. Now that would be something to see, Adam thought – assuming they wrote down their history after the fact. Likely the first thing they did with their brand-new tool.
With those clarification out of the way, Twilight continued. Wisteria saw the pattern of twigs in the mud, framed in her hoofprint, and got the idea for writing with hooves. She took another stick in her mouth, stamped on the ground in another patch of mud, and tried to replicate the pattern. After several tries, she found she could do it reliably – so she started exploring other, more complex patterns, to see what would stand out the most. As it turned out, simple lines and shapes stood out the best, while twists and turns and sharp angles did not.
As she experimented, Wisteria found that all the sounds in Ơhqer could be represented with just a few basic shapes, easily reproduced with a rod held in the mouth and a hoof stuck in the mud. Literally any equine could do this – regulars, pegasi, and unicorns alike could all write with a common script. However, even though the regular equines were quick to adopt Wisteria’s writings, there was a great deal of resistance from the other two tribes. Neither of them wanted to adopt the ‘lowly’ writing system, a word Adam had to suggest when Twilight struggled to find the right word in English. Both of them were merely content with their feathered script, and saw no cause to go along with what the regulars had made for themselves. The key phrase here was ‘for themselves’ – for they were adamant that the three write their own ways.
It wasn’t until Wisteria herself demonstrated the ease of writing her way to the other two tribes, and adding that a single script was easier to learn than three, that slowly yet surely, they started to adopt hers, abandoning the ones they had made for themselves. Not least of which was Yere Kisữ and Yara Ariman, who had been consolidating their power in an Ơhesti in its infancy. It wasn’t until they proved their divine control over the Sun and Moon that their rule was legitimized – and when it was, it was Wisteria’s script that outlined their laws and proclamations.
“Just as her flowers took root in the gardens,” Twilight concluded, “so too did her writing take root in Ơhqer, and Ơhesti itself.”
How àpropos, he thought.
By the time Twilight finished recounting the story, they were just a stone’s throw away from Sulfoyarqa’s cottage. It was unmistakable who would live here – it was frankly more zoo than house. Adam noticed something odd about the place – usually it would be a lot noisier than this. But here? Now? It was rather quiet – almost like something was wrong here. Or they’re just entirely unfamiliar with my presence, he thought.
Twilight knocked on the front door – gently, to avoid sounding forceful. Adam made no further movement once he arrived on her porch.
Sulfoyarqa opened up within the moment. “Hõ Ħãtir, hõ Ħedem, qapata,” she greeted. “Riwe ħalnjamu?”
“Edemley sơhơgjemư ala almu kokoiñka mưlzḷ siapa,” Twilight explained in her native tongue. “Ṛsiþẽ ilenzevư?”
Sulfoyarqa sharply drew a breath, taken aback by what her friend had just said – even though he could only recognize the roots for speaking, helping, and a clever way of calling his suit literally ‘hard-clothes.’ I guess that’s also the word for ‘armor,’ he assumed. But she was enthusiastic all the same. “Ħem! Ħem! Pise þesơ ħezebưvimẽ!” She gestured them both inside.
Adam had never seen the inside of Sulfoyarqa’s home before – even so long ago, when he, they, and the rest of their friends entered the Kala-Uha Silasa. So now that he was here, he was surprised to see, despite what she was known for, how neat and orderly it was. The floors were swept, the upholstery was spotless, and even the pots in front of the fireplace were serviceable. Second only to the cleanroom in Kãtṛlat, I’ll bet. But then, right now, it doesn’t make a difference.
Yet even so, the three were not alone inside. Here and there were various animal habitats – mice within the walls, birds in gilded cages, and he could have sworn he saw a bear disappear around the corner into the next room when he peeked at her furniture. That would be amazing if Sulfoyarqa could have tamed such a dangerous creature as a bear, he thought. So why didn’t she try with that other bear in the Kala-Uha? Or the wolves, for that matter?
“Ħama bḷd ħalmu Ħedem kṛsja kokoħixka mưlzḷ teþel,” Sulfoyarqa commented.
“Ilteþelvư,” Twilight insisted. Then, facing Adam, she switched back to English. “Do you want me to hold your suit in place?”
“Yes, please.” He nodded.
Without another word, she lit her horn and glided her telekinetic grip over the shoulders and chest on his suit. Try as he might, he found he couldn’t move those pieces. Just as he trusted her when he climbed out of the suit in the Kãtṛlat hospital, now he was trusting her to help him emerge from the suit – for the last time.
But before I forget. . . . “Zulu-Alfa, this is Somerset,” he radioed above. “I am disembarking from my EVA suit at this time. Be advised, I may be out of contact once this is complete, until I return to the lander. Somerset out.” I hope they understand.
He turned back to Twilight. “Let’s do this.”
She nodded, once but with vigor. “Let’s!”
Adam slithered his arms out of the suit’s. He felt along the pectoral cavity, searching out for the lever that controlled the lock in the life-support backpack. “Here it is. . . .” He gripped it, as firmly as he could with just his fingertips, and pushed it straight down as far as it would go. When it hit the bottom of the slot, he felt the pressure of the equipment release from his back as the suit hinged open, followed by a rush of cool air caressing his sweating skin. As good as the cooling garment was, it wasn’t perfect, and did not hold a candle to genuinely fresh air.
He couldn’t easily worm out of the suit all the way without something to grip above him. Twilight had to tilt him forward, bending the suit over by its waist – and she and Sulfoyarqa watched as this being from beyond the stars emerged from his metallic chrysalis. With that, the biological barrier between Earth and Rhysling had been broken – hopefully to no meaningful consequence.
He didn’t know what Sulfoyarqa was expecting to see beneath the suit, though he knew Twilight had seen everything about him. Everything – whether he liked it or not. One thing was sure, however – both of them reäcted as though they had smelled something so rank, so profoundly foul, that they could not breathe the same air as him. His waste garment was completely dry – which meant that what they were smelling was the stench of sweat, sweat that had built up not just on his body, but inside the suit as well. He felt around its interior – Jesus Christ, this is grimy. I really should have taken the time to scrub this thing out.
“Outside!” Twilight coughed, sputtering for air. “Go outside, Adam! We will wash you!”
I’ll admit the first part of this chapter was mostly a stream-of-consciousness, since 90% of what was written there had been dancing in my head literally for years. I think I was writing at a thousand words per hour, which might honestly be my record.
Part of that mess was Celestia and Luna manipulating the Sun and Moon, respectively. I’ve always wondered how that worked, while trying to reconcile it with a more realistic heliocentric model of their world. I’ve read a few creative solutions – Message in a Bottle comes to mind at once, but saying anything more on that would be a huge spoiler.
Ultimately I went with the cultural solution, that it’s all an ancient ruse to legitimize their reign. Handwaving it, in other words. I’m sorry I couldn’t do better.
Another part of that stream-of-consciousness was the name of the capitol city, Kãtṛlat. You might think I’m too lazy to come up with something more creative – but I did; it literally means “sister-fort.”
It’s time to talk about time! Again!
Like I said back in the Chapter 8 notes, I’d come back to this topic for the calendar – units of time larger than a day, but smaller than a year. There’s a ton (and I mean a ton) of stuff to go over, so I’ll be splitting this up into sections.
I actually had a bit of trouble coming up with a calendar for Equestria, with me entertaining varying number of months and weeks per month. Eventually, I just said “Screw this,” and let my fingers decide for me. Nine months, each with six weeks, each in with six days. (Truth is, it was six days per week from the start.)
Twelve months is fairly universal here on Earth, since they’re based on the phases of the Moon. Hell, “month” and “moon” are cognates with each other in English – and in some languages, they’re the same thing! Lunar months, if timed exactly by the celestial body, last about 29.53 days – easy to round up to 30. (The exception to this rule is the Tongan calendar, which has thirteen months.)
But the solar year lasts 365.24219 days – and discounting the decimal differences (which were resolved in different ways, if at all), that meant one needed to add five more days to a twelve-moon year. The Mayans simply tacked it onto the end of the year. The Julian and Gregorian calendars uses months of 30 and 31 days.
As for the .24219, we resolve that with leap years – adding 29 February under the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Whichever years are leap years is actually the chief difference between the two calendars. The Julian calendar marks every fourth year as a leap year, no exceptions – 365.25 days. This is close, but about 1600 years later, the Catholic Church noticed how 21 March and the Vernal Equinox started drifting further and further apart.
Eventually, the Church started calculating a better leap-year implementation, and in October 1582, Pope Gregory XIII instituted the reform, effective immediately. The first thing that happened was the deletion of some extra dates – 5-14 October 1582 never occured. But the weekdays were not subject to deletion – which is to say, 4 October 1582 was on a Thursday, but 15 October was on a Friday.
Under the Gregorian calendar, leap years occur every four years, subject to the following rules: the year must be perfectly divisible by four, except when the year is perfectly divisible by one hundred, except when the year is perfectly divisible by four hundred. That’s why 1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 was.
Days of the week – this is going to be an especially long one. Buckle up.
We’re familiar with seven days per week, from Sunday to Saturday – but that’s true for English.
First off, not everyone starts the week on Sunday. The majority of nations actually tend to start their week on Monday – the Catholic reason being that Sunday is considered the Day of Rest in the Bible. Muslim nations like to start on Saturday (though this isn’t universal) – for a similar reason to the Catholic Church: Friday is considered a holy day, meant for communal prayer. And then there are the Maldives, who are unique in starting on Friday. Don’t even ask me why; I still don’t know.
And then there are the ways the days of the week are named. We Anglophones are used to the ancient Germanic system, which names each day after a god in the Germanic pantheon. Sunday and Monday are what you’d expect. Tuesday is named after Týr (Tír in Old English), known for sacrificing his hand to the mythological wolf Fenrir but surprisingly little else. Wednesday is named after Odin (Wódin) – I’m sure you know who that is. Thursday is obviously named after Thor (Þunor), another name you’d quickly recognize. Friday is named after Freyja (Fríge), the goddess of love and beauty. Saturday is named after Saturn, borrowed from the Romans. (The original Norse name for this day was laudardagr, literally “washing-day.”)
By and large most places name them after the Sun, Moon, and the five planets visible with the naked eye, in a system developed multiple times independently from one another. Tuesday is named after Mars, Wednesday after Mercury, Thursday after Jupiter, Friday after Venus, and Saturday after Saturn. You can see this in Roman Catholic countries, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia.
Classical Chinese deserves a special mention here, even though their days are named the same way as above, since their names of the planets are associated with the five classical elements. Mars is the “Fire-Star,” Mercury the “Water-Star,” Jupiter the “Wood-Star,” Venus the “Metal-Star,” and Saturn the “Earth-Star.” This practice is replicated in Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, and Tibetan.
Some places simply name the days of the week. Such a week would have a “First-Day,” a “Second-Day,” and so forth. Russian, Hungarian, modern Chinese, and Tok Pisin number their days from Monday. (Modern Chinese’s Sunday is still Sunday, however.) Icelandic, Hebrew, Greek, Georgian, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Navajo number their days from Sunday (though Navajo inherits Sunday from Spanish, and builds entirely off of it). Swahili uniquely numbers their days from Saturday, in a system inherited from Arabic.
The Bishnipriya Manipuri and Meitei languages are unique in that their days are named from a creation myth. They start theirs on Sunday (“the Hill”), going to Monday (“King’s Climb”), Tuesday (“Earth’s Birth”), Wednesday (“Houses Built”), Thursday (“Horses Rode”), Friday (“Blood Flood”), and Saturday (“Swords Washed”).
But all of these systems rely on the same assumption, over and over: that a week has seven days. What if it didn’t?
The Mayans (which we all know were completely accurate in predicting the end of the world in 2012) and Aztecs worked with a ritual cycle of twenty weeks, each with thirteen days. For regular day-to-day life, they had a year of eighteen months, each with four five-day weeks. (This one also had one more five-day week tacked on at the end, to line up with the tropical year.)
Several other places had five-day weeks – including the traditional market cycle in Korea, the Javanese calendar, and the 10th-century Icelandic calendar.
The ancient Chinese and ancient Egyptian calendars both had ten-day weeks, developed independently from each other. Incidentally, so does the French Revolutionary Calendar.
The Akan (a Kwa people in West Africa) keep a six-day week, even concurrently with the usual seven-day week. Meanwhile, the Igbo maintain a four-day “market week.” Smaller still is suggested in Guipuscoan Basque, which has traces of a three-day week.
And the Balinese Pawukon calendar is a genuine headache for the uninitiated. It has 210 days divided among ten concurrently-running weeks, each with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten days. That’s right, every day is also its own week – except when it’s not (which I’ll explain below).
Because of this, each day has ten different names, depending on which week cycle you’re looking at. What’s worse, because 210 is not evenly divisible by 4, 8, or 9, extra days must be inserted into those weeks. (For the four- and eight-day weeks, the penultimate weekday is repeated twice in the week that would have otherwise ended on the 72nd day; for the nine-day week, the first weekday of the first week is repeated three times.)
Three of these cycles have a special significance. The three-day week is meant to set market days. Which day it is depends on the village, but they always happen every three days. The seven-day week is the only one that names its individual weeks. The five- and seven-day weeks overlap five times (every forty-two days) in a given calendar year, and each one is celebrated as a holiday. This also happens when the three- and five-day weeks overlap.
I’m sorry, but now we have to crunch some numbers. Each day in the five-, seven-, and ten-day weeks carries a ritual value called an urip. Each urip is arranged in a specific order in each week:
- 5-day week: 9, 7, 4, 8, 5
- 7-day week: 5, 4, 3, 7, 8, 6, 9
- 10-day week: 5, 2, 8, 6, 4, 7, 10, 3, 9, 1
From here, we add the five- and seven-day urips together, then add one. If the sum is more than ten, then ten must be subtracted. The resulting value determines the numerical day of the ten-day week (which should match its urip), which day it is in the two-day week (Pepet if even, Menga if odd), and whether it even is a day in the one-day week (it only counts even days, which are all called Luang).
As mentioned before, Equestria operates on a six-day week, with each weekday numbered one through five, using a similar-yet-different numerating system than that used for mathematics – using triangle numbers. I set aside the last day of the week as a market day, following similar trends mentioned previously. Aren’t you glad I kept it simple?
Now, what about seasons? Originally I planned on three, splitting summer in half and merging each into spring and fall – a season for sowing, a season of reaping, and a season of resting (i.e. winter). Then I remembered about humorism – a Medieval concept that an imbalance of four certain bodily fluids, or humors, can produce certain human behaviors. An excess of blood made one sanguine (cheerful), for instance.
Each of the four humors were linked with four qualities, grouped in opposing pairs – warm and cold, and dry and moist. (Sanguinity, going back to the previous example, was considered warm and moist.) I simply took those pairs and named the seasons after them, positioning them where they would make sense. (The “sky” suffix was taken directly from Chinese.)
But not all places on Earth observe four seasons. India tends to observe six seasons – spring runs from 15 February to 14 April, summer from 15 April to 14 June, the monsoon from 15 June to 14 August, autumn from 15 August to 14 October, and winter is sort of split in half, the first from 15 October to 14 December, the second from 15 December to 14 February.
The Cree traditionally worked on six seasons as well, but with different definitions. Winter runs from January through February, a “break-up” season (referring to the seasonal ice in lakes and rivers) from March through April, spring from May through June, summer from July through August, autumn from September through October, and “freeze-up” (again, seasonal ice) from November through December.
The tropics tend to observe only two seasons – simply wet and dry season. Assuming the northern hemisphere (they are reversed in the southern), the dry season runs from 1 November to 30 April, and the wet from 1 May to 31 October. Of course, different peoples native to the tropics will mark the boundaries in their own ways; this is based on meteorologial data.
Civilizations that depend on rivers will observe three seasons, but not quite how I had originally planned them. The first seasons is when the river overflows and floods the banks, watering any crops that may be planted along the way, followed by a season of growth and harvest, then a season of rest while preparing for the next flood. This was the system observed in Ancient Egypt, and one used in Thailand today.
Past the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, seasons tend to be defined by the daytime – in the Arctic (reversed in Antarctica), the summer is cast in perpetual daylight, and winter is shrouded in eternal night.
And then there’s Australia. Different Aboriginal peoples divide up the year into different seasons, all depending on where on the continent they live.
I’ll play nice and use just one example – though I’m sorely tempted to list more. The Yolŋu, who live in northeastern Arnhem Land, divide up the year into Dhuludur (“pre-wet season,” October to November), Bärra’mirri (“heavy rain and growth,” December to January), Mayaltha (“flowering,” February to March), Midawarr (“fruiting,” late March to April), Ŋathaŋamakuliŋmirri (“two-week harvest,” late April), Dharratharramirri (“early dry season,” May to June), Burrugumirri (“birthing of sharks and stingrays,” three weeks in July to early August), and Rarrandharr (“dry season,” August to October).
Years are a complicated subject.
To start (no pun intended), the epoch is the starting point of the calendar, typically a significant event from which everyone references time. Contrary to what some Twitter users might have you believe, the Earth is not 2,021 years old – it’s closer to 4.5 billion. Of course, mankind has been around for barely a sliver of that time, so naturally we’d have to pick a time to start counting.
To be clear, 2021 (the year in which I’m writing this), used for the Julian and Gregorian calendars, might be referred to as the Common Era (C.E.), but this is really just a politically-correct rebranding of the Year of the Lord (Annó Dominí (A.D.) if one prefers Latin, though the full phrase runs Annó Dominí Nostrí Jesu Chrístí, “In the Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ”). It’s supposed to count from the year of Jesus Christ’s birth, as calculated in the sixth century A.D. by a Byzantine monk named Dionýsius Exiguus. It became popular when an English monk named Bǽda the Venerable used it to date events in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731 A.D. and adopted by the Papacy and by the various Orthodoxies for the purposes of celebrating Easter. Today, it’s become the dominant dating method used throughout the world.
What about events that happened before Christ’s time? If such a time could even be reckoned, a reverse dating scheme is used – “Before the Common Era” (B.C.E.) or “Before Christ” (B.C.) (Ante Chrístus Nátus (A.C.N.) if, again, one prefers Latin).
But other dating methods exist. Some calendars attempt to calculate the exact year of the creation of the world (Annó Mundí). The Hebrew calendar’s epoch is exactly one year before God created the world, 3760 B.C. (formerly it counted from the destruction of the Second Temple around 70 A.D.). Similarly, the Byzantine calendar calculated the same event has having happened on 1 September 5509 B.C.
If you want to get scientific, but also avoid marking ten-figure years, the Holocene calendar, as proposed by Cesare Emiliani in 1993 A.D., adds 10,000 to A.D. years, while subtracting B.C. years from 10,001 – which gives a surprisingly decent estimate for the start of human civilization (i.e. the first settlements and agriculture), according to archaeological data. But when it comes to radiocarbon dating, “present day” refers to 1 January 1950 A.D. – this point has not shifted due to significant nuclear weapons testing artificially altering the proportions of carbon isotopes in the environment, making carbon dating afterwards unreliable.
Many places rely on multiple calendar eras. India, for instance, has several samvat, or calendar eras, of which three are most significant. Vikrama, Old Śaka, and Śaka. The Vikrama Samvat is used in the north, and started in 57 B.C. The Old Śaka Samvat’s epoch is unknown – the first millennium B.C. is as specific as any contemporary scholar can get – but remains important in ancient Hinduist, Buddhist,and Jainist texts. The Śaka Samvat does have a concrete start – 78 A.D.
India also has four yugas, or world ages, each of which lasts hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Each successive yuga tends to worsen as time progresses, similar to the Four Ages of Man in Greek mythology. The first one was the Satyayuga (सत्ययुग, “Age of Truth”), which lasted for 1,728,000 years, or 4,800 divine years (1 divine year is 360 years for us mortals). The second was the Tretāyuga (त्रेतायुग, “Age of Three”), lasting 1,296,000 (3,600 divine) years. The third is the Dvāparayuga (द्वापरयुग, “Age of Two”), lasting 864,000 (2,400 divine) years. The fourth, and current, is the Kaliyuga (कलियुग, “Age of Darkness”), lasting 432,000 (1,200 divine) years. This Kaliyuga started on 17 or 18 February 3102 B.C., so we’re just getting started. At the end of this Kaliyuga, Viṣnu (the Hindu god of maintenance) will reïncarnate on Earth as Kakli to exterminate the sinners; a new Satyayuga will began afterward.
For another instance, Imperial China ran on both regnant calendars and a traditional farming calendar. While the latter has no universally-agreed epoch, the most common one is 2697 B.C. or 2698 B.C. – the year the legandary Yellow Emperor ascended the throne. These years are also marked with one of the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, water – in that order) and one of the twelve animals of the Chinese Zodiac, in a sixty-year cycle. 2021 A.D., for instance, is a metal ox year. The Tibetan calendar does the same thing, but also assigns gender to years – but since they change every year, one can infer gender from the animal.
The regnant calendars numbered years based on the reign of the current Emperor. The first Chinese regnant era year, Jiànyuán (建元, “Original Founding”), was established by Emperor Hàn Wǔ (漢武); Jiànyuán 1 corresponds to 141 B.C. Unlike with other powers, an Emperor could start and end eras as he pleased – and in Emperor Wǔ’s case, he did so more often than any other emperor. (Then again, he reigned the longest of any ethnic Hàn Emperor.) If the Emperor wished to inherit an era from his predecessor, he may do so – as was often the case in eras of prosperity. Japan, Korea, and Vietnam have inherited this practice from China.
The final Chinese regnant era was the Xuāntǒng (宣統, “Proclamation of Unity”) era, from 1908-1912 A.D. After Emperor Pǔyí was overthrown, China suffered a schism, one that still lasts today. The Republic of China (which we commonly call Taiwan) uses the Mínguó (民國, “Republic,” literally the “People’s State”) calendar, with its epoch placed on 1 January 1912, but otherwise functions identically to the Gregorian Calendar. The People’s Republic, on the other hand, uses the Gregorian for everyday business, keeping the traditional farming calendar only for traditional holidays.
Japan, however, is the only Asian nation to retain the practice of regnant years – indeed, Japan is the only nation in the world to retain an emperor in power at all. Currently in 2021 A.D., it is the Reiwa (令和, “Beautiful Harmony”) era, as proclaimed in 2019 A.D. when Emperor Naruhito ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne. Before this was the Heisei (平成, “Universal Peace”) era, under Emperor Emeritus Akihito – he will be referred to by this name after his death.
The United Kingdom also has regnant years – currently in 2021 A.D., it is 70 Eliz. 2, or the seventieth year of the reign of Elizabeth II Windsor. Sumer also had regnant years, but given that we cannot find a complete list of Sumerian kings, it becomes tricky to date events in that region.
Sometimes when an old regime is forcibly overthrown, a new calendar is created in an attempt to usher in a new age. The French Revolutionary Calendar started on 22 September 1792 A.D., the Autumnal Equinox, but was abandoned in favor of the Annó Dominí in 1805 A.D. (year 12 in the Revolutionary Calendar). The Juche Era, used in North Korea, puts its epoch on 1 January 1912 A.D. – the year Kim Il-sung was born (his actual date of birth, 15 April, is celebrated as a national holiday, the “Day of the Sun”). And yes, this has the same epoch as the Mínguó calendar. South Korea, on the other hand, uses a similar policy as the People’s Republic – Gregorian for everyday business, but they also maintain the traditional Dangun (단군) calendar for holidays – its epoch is 2333 B.C., with the founding of the first Korean kingdom.
Then there’s Unix time – which traditionally relies on a 32-bit integer ticking up once per second. Its epoch is midnight UTC on 1 January 1970. The Y2K scare was because people thought computers, particularly mission-critical ones, might not be able to adjust away from years staring with “19--” – but as it turned out, most computers just carried on like nobody’s business. However, we will run into trouble at the end of the Unix era, because that 32-bit signed integer will flip over at 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038 A.D. For computer systems with an unsigned 32-bit integer, that flip will happen at 6:28:15 UTC on 7 February 2106 A.D. Thankfully, more modern systems rely on a 64-bit signed integer. That will flip over at 15:30:08 UTC on 4 December 282,277,026,596 A.D. – nearly 22 times the currently-estimated age of the Universe.
And to cap this all off, let’s do some calculations.
First, the length of an Equestrian year. It’ll be easier if we start by converting to Terrestrial hours. There are 8760 Terrestrial hours in a Terrestrial year (assuming the Gregorian calendar and a nonleap year). A Rhyslinger day is two-thirds a Terrestrial day, and there are 324 (senary 1300) Rhyslinger days in a Rhyslinger year. From there:
324d_R \times 16\frac{h_T}{d_R} = 5,184\frac{h_R}{y_T}A Rhyslinger year, therefore, is roughly three-fifths of a Terrestrial year.
As for the epoch of the Equestrian calendar, while I wasn’t able to calculate it myself, Midknight Defender commented below that he had essentially done it for me, having arrived at 1701 B.C. – which he interpreted as a reference to Star Trek (since that’s the USS Enterprise’s hull number). In reality, I had essentially pulled the Equestrian year from out of thin air, so he had merely spotted a coïncidence.
I PMed him later that day, asking him to show me his work, and he obliged:
4,196y_R \times 9m_R \times 36d_R \times 16\frac{h_T}{d_R} = 21,752,064\frac{h_T}{d_R}\frac{21,752,064\frac{h_T}{d_R}}{24h_T} = 906,336d_T\frac{906,336d_T}{365.2425\frac{d_T}{y_T}} ≈ 2,481.463y_T1,997.55 - 2,481.463 - 1 = -484.913The Equestrian calendar epoch, in relation to Terrestrial timekeeping, is therefore roughly in December 484 B.C. At that time:
- Xérxēs I of Persia was putting down rebellions in Egypt and Babylon.
- The Temple of Castor and Pollux had been dedicated.
- Wǔ Zǐxū (伍子胥), a general serving the State of Wú (吳國) during the Spring and Autumn period, died at the age of 75. All ethnic Hàn people with the surname Wǔ (伍) ultimately claim to be descended from him.
As for the 1701 B.C. result, that was a combination of being rough with the numbers (he initially forewent hour accuracy) and a miscalculation (he forgot this story is set in an alternate 1997 A.D.).
Here’s a rare instance of me correcting a correction. At one point I changed “firsty-eighth” to “ten-eighth,” both because it more accurately reflects Equestrian counting, and so Twilight would be more ‘consistently wrong’ – if that makes sense. Admiral Biscuit insisted I keep it as “firsty-eighth;” apparently he found it cuter.
Oh man, if you want consonant clusters, look no further than the languages of the Caucasian Mountains. And that includes the Kartvelian family – a closely-knit language family with only four members. I’ll focus on the principal member, Georgian.
Georgian has some insane consonant clusters, where one could potentially pronounce over six in a row, e.g. გვფრცქვნი (gvprckvni, “you peel us”). Yes, that is exactly one syllable. There are also “harmonic clusters,” ones where the consonants are grouped by a pharyngeal harmony, e.g. ბგერა (bgera, “sound”), წყალი (c’q’ali, “water”).
English phonotactics are generally (C(C))V(C(C(C(C)))), with a few exceptions. Georgian permits (C(C(C(C(C(C(C(C))))))))V(C). If you’re wondering about Equestrian, we’ll get to that eventually.
As an aside, the Georgian script is actually bicameral, just like Latin (i.e. it has uppercase and lowercase letters) – it’s just that 99% of everything is written with just the lowercase letters.
Minimal pairs are a good way of establishing what are phonemic sounds in a language. Take this English trio: same, sane, sang. The only difference is the place of articulation for the final nasal – yet these are all valid English words, none of which can be confused for the others.
Naturally, I had planned for a good while on having ãtir and antir be two words in Equestrian, but mean two very different things. I couldn’t decide until the week before I wrote this – that I would have “antir” (harmonized as andir) mean “cat.”
Just be glad I didn’t pick something profane.
Here’s a plot point that was in the story very early in development – the origin of the Equestrian writing system.
This folk tale follows a pretty similar story to another, real-life script – Hangeul (한글, “Great Script”). For a long time, literacy in Korea was limited only to the elite, as it was written in Classical Chinese characters, or hanja (한자), well out of reach of the lower classes. Then in 1443, King Sejong the Great (fourth in the Joseon dynasty) created a much simpler script that can allow literally anyone to read and write Korean – this was Hangeul, though it wouldn’t be called that until 1912. Before this, it was known as the Eonmun (언문, “Vulgar Script”). It was said that “[a] wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.”
As outlined in the Hunminjeong’eum Haerye (훈민정음 해례, “Explanations and Examples of the Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People”), the shapes of the letters were not arbitrary – the consonants actually encoded specific phonological features, which made the script the world’s first featural alphabet. The vowels were based on Korean’s deeply-seated vowel harmony, with letters sorted into yin and yang groups.
Here’s how the vowels work, at least when they were first designed. Source
However, the literary elite opposed the alphabet, as it threatened their status – not to mention that they believed only hanja was a legitimate writing system. It flourished anyway, just as Sejong the Great had anticipated – though through a series of actions from future kings, it would become stifled and heavily irregular in spelling. It wouldn’t be until 1912 that standardization would take place, but it was stifled by Japanese authorities, who had annexed the Korean penninsula in 1910, and outlawed teaching Korean in 1938, and publishing in Korean in 1941.
The script as published in 1946, after Japan’s surrender, has remained relatively unchanged since.
For those of you who had been around since before the days of Friendship is Magic, you might find the name of the script’s inventor a little familiar.
Say hello to Wysteria! Source
Wysteria first appeared as a toy figure in the summer of 2003. In animations, she was featured quite regularly, in A Charming Birthday, Friends Are Never Far Away, A Very Minty Christmas, The World’s Biggest Tea Party, and in particular The Princess Promenade. This last one is significant, as this was the DVD Lauren Faust was given when Hasbro asked her to retool My Little Pony. Also of note is that, in each appareance, she was voice by Tabitha St. Germain.
Why did I pick her? While for this story I wanted to acknowledge only the canon established in Season 1, I also wanted to make sure I didn’t contradict future seasons either. And to the best of my knowledge, Wysteria, while being a prominent character in The Princess Promenade, still remains locked to G3 – so she was my safest bet. (Originally the script was meant to be attributed to Star-Swirl the Bearded, but then I remembered that he wasn’t mentioned until Season 2 – not to mention that he was a unicorn, and therefore would’ve had that bias.)
On another note, it should be noted that Wysteria is spelled with a Y only for that character – literally all other instances spell it with an I, wisteria. This leads me to believe her unique spelling may have originated from a typo all those years ago – which was why I used the I spelling in the story, instead of the Y spelling usually associated with her.
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well this was a nice lore dump. and heh he really should have cleaned the inside of that suit.
y'know
i can actually say that i enjoy the story again
Why, it's almost like he's not working with another trained linguist or something! The perfect is the enemy of the good, Adam.
Pronounced "Planck."
This raises some interesting questions about Sunset Shimmer...
I'd assumed you were going for the "deep magic outside the scope of the linguist's research" approach up until you came out and said "Nightmare Moon was a hoax and the fundamental foundation of the entire series is a lie in this timeline." Sharing every part of the authorial process has its downsides. (Again, you can just say that Adam assumes it's a ruse. The perfectly timed year and day certainly seem to suggest that.)
And yeah, for all of his diligence with the carbon scrubbers, Adam never did much other maintenance with the suit. Oof. Not the best first impression. Hopefully things will go smoother after a scrubdown.
And we finally have Twilight’s actual name!
I was wondering when we’d get to that.
Actually, there was a minor Y2K20 problem because, apparently, a lot of Y2K readiness was just accomplished by tweaking the logic so two-digit years would be translated to four-digit years in the range 1920-2019 instead of 1900-1999... deferring the Y2K problem by 20 years.
Unlike Y2K, work started on that over 20 years in advance... I know I've been seeing periodic articles on technical sites about the progress on avenues for that in the Linux kernel and various BSD kernels for at least five years now. ("Various avenues" because there are various degrees of "fixed" depending on how much you are able to patch the source to the programs and recompile.)
What? No love for MacOS 8's Y2K20 problem, old Mac hardware's Y2K40 problem, PC BIOS's Y2100 problem, or MS-DOS's Y2107 problem? (source)
More likely it's the same reason that Princess Cadance isn't spelled Cadence and Bon Bon's name is officially Sweetie Drops... trademarkability.
So what did he call Nǂesell when trying to say her name? Was she just embarrassed by his repeated failures, or did he call her something embarrassing?
I really enjoyed this chapter.
One suggestion. It seems like there was a small time jump between this chapter and the previous one. However, it's not made as clear as it could be. I found myself a bit confused by the fluency of of Adam and by Derpy Hooves delivering a letter.
Keep up the great work!
In Hungarian the last day of the week Sunday literally translates to market-day.
Really gotta agree with FOME here, making the entire foundation of the series a lie is not a good move. I doubt the princesses would simply stop the moon's translation or Equestria's rotation - effectively the same on the planet's point of view and much less astronomically disturbing - on a whim to prove they can do it to humans, but taking that part away breaks too much of the world for it to stay the same.
Sure, it likely won't make any difference in the story, but Luna can't have been Nightmare Moon wanting eternal night without that and everyone would know they're not the stewards of Day and Night after NM stopped Celestia from doing her stuff.
If the ponies don't care then eh, but things fall apart a lot without that.
In the end yeah, no changes unless you try to touch anything remotely dependant on that with a ten foot pole. Then you have a problem.
On other subjects, Adam is so damn lucky he has a genuine genius learning English. He'd be quite screwed otherwise, although barely making mention to how fucked would be learning it as a first contact language for ponies is a copt out in a story about the linguistic difficulties of first contact. Unless there's a lot of linguists ripping their manes off in contact with Twilight that we don't see, that is.
Music that started playing at this moment?
The Great Escape.
You know, thats a thought. How will he get bck inside the Shuttle with all the Party that Pinkie has stuffed in there?
All the cryo chambers now have a complementary cupcake. Just chilling?
That- okay, that has so many additional impacts on the story that I'm not even sure we're talking about the same universe as Friendship is Magic.
Nightmare Moon is gone, for one, since the entire reason for Luna going Nightmare Moon was because, as the alicorn of the night, she was responsible for it and lived in it. This isn't possible if the solar and lunar cycle is a lie, so she'd have no reason to become the loner sister who rules the night and go Nightmare Moon, nevermind that Nightmare Moon's entire 'eternal night' shtick wouldn't be possible in the first place. Which also means her return never happened, so why is Twilight in Ponyville and friends with the other mane 6? She'd never have gone to Ponyville and found the Elements of Harmony if they were never needed (heck, do the Elements even exist in this universe?).
But even if Nightmare Moon somehow happened and Celestia for some reason sealed her in the moon, then the lie would have been revealed on the night she returned from the moon. Remember that the night lasted longer that day, since Nightmare Moon interrupted the Sumer Sun Celebration right as it started, making the night last all the way until she was defeated. If these events still happened, then the sun would have come up regardless of Nightmare Moon's return, revealing the lie for all to see.
It may seem the easiest way out from a science writing point of view, but from a world building point of view? You just knocked out one of the primary support pillars of the setting, and it's kinda taking the story with it in its collapse.
Funny thing about the "4.5 billion years" figure... that came from an estimate of how long a single layer of sediment would form, assuming no calamities like mudslides or greater.
Obviously, that italicized assumption is rather unrealistic, and considering how even a small-scale event can add thousands of sediment layers in an instant... suffice it to say that the actual age of the planet would be considerably shorter.
Especially if the "global flood" story that every ancient culture seems to have is in any way based on an actual event.
I wonder if anything interesting happened in 1701 BC that was noticeable from Earth...
Or is this maybe just a subtle nod to the USS Enterprise’s hull number.
wow, that was a lore dump : )
Nice chapter nevertheless, good to finally see Adam out of the suit, now he's free and can finally touch the ingenious : )
Also, I initially thought, wouldn't floating market day make more sense? Then I thought about trans-settlement logistics, and that it's mostly for local markets even in the present days, nevermind historical... So, yeah.
She relished in such a task
She relished such a task. Relish means enjoy. You don't enjoy in things, and you don't relish in them either. You revel in things, though.
11038082
Funnily enough, a few years ago I was doing a little research on the legend of Atlantis when I stumbled across an article about a possible asteroid impact around 12,000-ish years ago causing a global flood
11038082
No? The age estimate comes from radiometric dating, usually the decay of uranium and thorium into lead.
And the "global flood" stories are most likely based on real, but much smaller events, such as glacial melts following the last ice age, or tsunamis caused by undersea earthquakes.
derpicdn.net/img/2021/10/11/2721620/large.png
One minor correction:
"we do not know for sure are telling the truth" I think this is missing a "they" before "are".
11038232
That's what the "which" is for.
11038205
I'd buy the "smaller than stated" idea... except they have too many consistencies for that. We're basically talking "Biblical account with names altered" levels here.
11038276
There aren't that many consistencies. From the stories, there is very little consistency for when it happened. And from the geological record, there is little to no evidence of flooding in many locations.
11038298
Oh? What would the evidence look like if it were true? Best I've heard is that we'd see, and I quote: "billions of dead things, buried in rock layers, laid down by water, all over the Earth."
And would you look at that! That's exactly what we see!
11038370
The presence of layers is expected in either case but the composition of the layers does not support a global flood hypothesis. The hypothesis does not allow for the strict stratification of eras, and would allow for (for example) dinosaur fossils to be found above fossils of large mammals about as often as below.
Hmmm, isn't that the AM/PM division (though they're are using UTC which doesn't) or would that be 'Equinox' used as a generality ??
11038249
I understand the sentence better now, but I think you meant "whom" (not which).
Cat sparkle.
Really loved this chapter, particularly the calendar and time stuff. I'm a great supporter of Holocene dating but I realize it probably won't ever catch on. Still, If I date something 11-4-12021, people who don't even know about the system will easily realize what date I was going for. Talking about Sumeria makes things a bit more difficult, though.
Loved the reveal of Twilight's name, and thankful for how fast she's picking up English.
I went with that the World used to orbit a binary star-system, the bigger star went nova and something intervened to save the planet. Whatever that something was, it broke physics real hard so they had to set-up a system where the remaining Sun and the collapsed neutron star, with the Moon set in front of it as a marker, orbit one another at a far out distance with the World in the middle. This system requires constant upkeep and the Sisters are just the latest in the bunch to be managing it.
"softly, so he couldn’t hear him. Eventually"
"softly, so he couldn’t hear her. Eventually"?
I admit I don't understand a lot of this but I have to say I find it annoying twilight is better at learning english than adam is at learning Ơhqer.
A few chapters back she was able to state with useful accuracy what was happening with his oxygen meanwhile he wouldn't have been able to do the same.
I know twilight's is super smart but he's supposed to be a best of the best linguist and twilight is at a large disadvantage.
Twilight has one english speaker to learn from while adam has an entire town of Ơhqer speakers.
Also a variety of smaller things like him being given a job which might make sense if I knew what was discussed about him but as it is doesn't make any apparent sense for them to do as he's trying to learn the language and him not knowing it really impairs his ability to do most jobs.
The thought that a suit like that would seal sufficiently to prevent contamination, that items could be sufficiently sterilized.
Sure the story depends on it but you're counting on 100% isolation when reality you're going to have some amount of leakage.
With gases and dust this is no problem you keep it to a low enough level it doesn't matter but things like bacteria? It could potentially only take one.
I get that the story depends on things working this way but in reality this would be an extremely dangerous and irresponsible risk to take.
Overall this has been very interesting and entertaining even if i'm not able to read a lot of it.
I'm hoping there will be a key once it's finished so I can go back and read the sections that aren't in a language google translate can help with.
Ahhhh mah gawd! It’s happening, stay calm! STAY CALM EVERYONE!
But... whether the 'y' is a result of misspelling or not doesn't change the fact that "Wysteria" is a name. I would think being a chosen name would override convention. This strikes me as spelling a person's name incorrectly because ones parents were too illiterate to spell the name correctly. Like "Jayden" and "Jeydan," or any of the myriad of name spellings alike.
Antir = cat?
pft cop-out
edit:
hol'up. The name was translated so I'll give it a pass, because as ssokolow point out the trademark-ability, such assumes someone is speaking English to start with.
Rationalization, huzzah!
Your author's note would be a great blog post by itself.
11038276
Hmm, the back and forth about the validity or lack of, of the flood story can trigger some people.
Perhaps this YouTube playlist by Aron Ra might be educational.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXJ4dsU0oGMJP95iZJqEjmc5oxY5r6BzP
It covers all the major arguments and depending on your background can be quite educational.
And so, the ponies were destroyed by the one thing no one had prepared for: HBO (Horrible Body Odor)