Kharis Belt IV

Kharis Belt IV kills an unprotected person twice a day, once by heat and once by cold, and has done so for as long as there has been life on it. The two hours in between are the whole of its people's open life.

Kharis Belt IV is the home world of the Serephine Dunekin. This page gathers what the people's entry, the record's two Serephine pages and the one history a Serephine has given the Archive say about it, and adds nothing to them. The name is all the record gives. What kind of body it is, and what the Belt in it refers to, the record does not say, and this page does not settle either. The record holds no Serephine polity or Federation standing for it.

Two Lethal Extremes a Day

The world has a thin atmosphere and a high ultraviolet flux. Its thermal inversion between day and night would kill an unprotected person in under an hour on either side. It is not one lethal extreme but two, twelve hours apart, every day. The light arrives through air with almost nothing in it to soften it. The sun it comes from is one no Serephine can stand under (Read at the Next Margin).

Between the extremes are the two margins, dawn and dusk. In those hours neither the heat nor the cold will kill, the ultraviolet is raked and weak, and the air is briefly worth breathing properly. A Serephine is closed, sealed and reflective, for the rest of the day and night, and opens only then. On Kharis Belt IV the margin is the route, and a day has a shape rather than a length.

Running on the Swing

Thin air burns badly. Combustion is available on Kharis Belt IV but feeble, slow and costly in a gas nobody can spare, so nothing was built on it. What the world gives in quantity is hard, unfiltered light, through air clear enough to focus. Serephine metallurgy is concentrated solar: mirrors, then better mirrors, then arrays, set at dawn to do their work through the middle of the day, when nobody can be beside them, and read at dusk.

The daily swing is the world's second energy source. A thermal gradient of that size, delivered twice a day without fail, is work. Serephine engineering is full of thermal-differential machines, buried thermal mass used as a battery, and structures built to buffer rather than to insulate. Their shelters are slow on purpose. Rock and ground between a body and the sky make the worst of the day arrive late, when it is already turning (Kesta Ul). The record files the world among its deserts in The Ledger and the Truce: not empty, but precise.

What the Record Does Not Hold

Whether Kharis Belt IV is a planet, a moon or another kind of body, and what Kharis and Belt name. Its star, its system, its distance from Sol and its place on the fold routes. Its size and gravity, and the length of its year; the record gives its day only as two extremes twelve hours apart. The chemistry of its air. Any other life on it: no page names another organism. Where on the world any Serephine lives, and any place-name. Any Serephine polity, kinship or Federation standing, and whose reading of a margin opens a window. How many Serephine live there. How and when the Corps first met them. No Serephine word for the world, or for anything, is on file.

See also: The Serephine Dunekin, Read at the Next Margin, Kesta Ul, Sethka Ru, The Ledger and the Truce, Habitable, for Whom.