Nerath

A map of Nerath would be out of date before it was finished, and the record holds none. What it holds of the world is a description of layers and seams, because nothing on Nerath holds still for longer than that.

Nerath is the home world of the Pelagene Littoral. This page gathers what the people's entry, the record's two Pelagene pages and the one history a Pelagene has given the Archive say about the world, and adds nothing to them. The record holds no Pelagene polity or Federation standing for Nerath, and this page settles neither.

No Ground and No Shore

Nerath has no stable landmass at all. Nowhere on it is dry: no beach, no island, no cave above the waterline. Weather contests the surface. The photic layer is the edge of the known world, and below it the pressure changes steeply and abruptly. The people's name is misleading on this point, since littoral suggests a shore and Nerath has none. Their littoral is a depth band: the lit, worked, inhabited layer between a dangerous surface above and a dark, heavy, largely unvisited deep below.

That band is the most punishing zone on the world. Its temperature, its dissolved load and its dissolved oxygen swing daily, and weather reaches down into it on a bad day. Up and down are not interchangeable there: up is light and storm, down is pressure and cold.

Not an Ocean of Water

Water, sea, brine and salinity are translations, made early, by humans and for human convenience (Timekeeping and the Common Record). What can be said without over-claiming is that Nerath's medium is dense, cold and strongly stratified, and is not one fluid but several. The layers differ in composition and density and lie stably on one another, mixing slowly or not at all. Each has its own dissolved load, its own optical depth and its own chemistry. Where two meet there is a seam, and the seams are the world's principal structures. The record deliberately does not name the compounds, and this page does not either.

It is also the largest set of pressure and chemical gradients on any inhabited world in the record. The Pelagene built a whole materials science on it, with no fire. Metal is grown from solution onto a form, slowly, at a chosen depth, and depth itself serves as the press (Where It Was Put).

Nothing Stays Where It Was Put

Nerath has no landmarks, no fixed places and no stable inventory. Everything drifts, dilutes, sinks or is carried. Growing up, for a Pelagene, is learning to hold a depth in a shifting column, and a Pelagene gives a history by which way a thing is moving and how fast, never by where it was. Habitable for its people and lethal to a human, Nerath is one of the record's worked cases of a world that is habitable for someone.

What the Record Does Not Hold

Nerath's star, its system, its distance from Sol and its place on the fold routes. Its size and gravity, the length of its day and year, and its moons. The chemistry of each layer, the number of layers and the depth of the band the Pelagene hold. Any other life on Nerath: no page names a Nerath organism. Any Pelagene settlement, polity, social order or Federation standing. How many Pelagene live there. Whose word Nerath is: Vela of the Seam leaves it unmarked because she does not know, and the Archive has not established it either. No Pelagene word for the world, or for anything, is on file.

See also: The Pelagene Littoral, Where It Was Put, Vela of the Seam, Mira of Brine, Habitable, for Whom, Timekeeping and the Common Record.