Ilenne

Every survey of Ilenne has opened with the weather, and none has closed with it, because nobody has yet found the rule the weather keeps.

Ilenne is the home world of the Mnemari and a member world of the Federation of Sentient Beings. It is a rocky planet a little smaller than Earth, circling an orange dwarf star that is old, dimmer than the Sun, and quiet: it has not flared on any instrument the Federation has turned on it. The star carries a survey catalogue number and no name the record has been given to use.

Ground and Air

Surface gravity is a little under nine-tenths of standard. Seas cover less of Ilenne than they cover of Earth, and none of them is deep or wide; most of the land lies far from any of them, on old, worn uplands of plateau and broad valley, high and dry.

The air is nitrogen and oxygen at about Earth's surface pressure, with somewhat less oxygen than Earth's and about seventy times as much carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide is what keeps the uplands above freezing under a dim star, and it is also what keeps a human off them. Unassisted, a human on Ilenne breathes harder within minutes, aches and thinks poorly within hours, and cannot live on the air for long; a mask that scrubs carbon dioxide is all the help needed, and it is still help: the world asks something of a human first, which is the line Habitable, for Whom draws. The standard air of a shared facility, thinner in carbon dioxide than Ilenne's, sits inside what a Mnemari body tolerates, which is why the species page can call them fully compatible with it.

The Rain That Keeps No Time

Ilenne's climate is cool, dry, and, in the one respect that governs everything alive on it, irregular. Rain reaches the uplands from the small seas in wet runs of some years at a time, and between the runs it fails. The failures have no period. A dry spell may last three years or most of a century, and the survey's climatologists, working from the whole span of Federation observation and, further back, from what Mnemari who were there can say, have found nothing that tells them which a new spell will be. The mechanism is not obscure: a slow exchange of heat between the seas and the air above them, of the kind that drives Earth's long droughts, running slower and less regularly here. What is missing is a pattern anyone could use.

A Biosphere Built to Wait

Life on the uplands is slow. Its producers are low and long-lived, holding water and reserves through the dry spells and growing in the wet runs, so that a hillside can stand apparently dead for decades and green within a season of the rain coming back. In a dry spell, food and water are not absent but scattered: a spring that held, a valley whose deep-rooted stands survived, a seep under one particular cliff. Which places hold differs from one spell to the next, by less than it seems to and more than is safe: a place that held once tends to hold again, but not every one, and not every time.

The large animals of the uplands live by walking between such places, and few of them are hunted, since a biosphere this sparse feeds few hunters. A large animal on Ilenne is killed far more often by the land than by anything living on it: thirst on the wrong route, a fall, cold. That, the Federation's biologists note, is the condition under which a lineage has the least reason to wear out, because where little kills from outside, a body that keeps itself in repair goes on paying for what it costs. Several Ilenne lineages live far longer than their size would suggest to anyone who learned biology on Earth.

What the Uplands Asked of the Mnemari

The Mnemari descend from the uplands' large foragers, and the survey reads their two defining traits against this world with the caution a cause deserves, since nobody observes one. The reading is this. Where the rain fails for spells of no fixed length, the one who survives the next long drought is the one who remembers the last exactly: which spring held and which only seemed to, the route between them, what grew where and in which year. A memory that softens such things, or rounds them toward what usually happens, kills its owner in the spell that is not usual. And where little but the land kills, the same individual can be there for spell after spell, carrying every one. On Ilenne a mind that loses no episode and a body that does not wear out are one answer, not two.

Nothing of what the answer costs is in the weather. A memory kept at full resolution because a spring might matter keeps a grief at the same resolution, in a hearing room as on a plateau; the species page says what that costs a mind, and the world does not.

What the Record Does Not Hold

Ilenne's distance from Sol and its place on the fold routes. Whether Ilenne is the Mnemari's own name for the world or the Federation's rendering of it, and the Mnemari name for its star. The length of its day and year, its moons, and the names of its seas, uplands and settlements. How many Mnemari live there, and whether any other people does. The Mnemari language, which the record renders only in translation.

See also: Mnemari, Ulessa, The Federation of Sentient Beings, Habitable, for Whom, Cross-Biosphere Taxonomy: Frames and Lineages, The Shape of a Life.