Sardain

On Sardain the coldest thing in the world is directly overhead, and a building that leaks heat is not wasteful but indiscreet. Every account of the place the record holds comes back to those two facts.

Sardain is the home world of the Ilveth. This page gathers what the people's entry and the one history an Ilveth has given the Archive say about the world, and adds nothing to them. The record holds no Ilveth polity and no Federation standing for Sardain, and this page settles neither.

Cold, Thin and Dim

Sardain is a slow, cold world far out around a small dim star. Its air is too thin and dry to hold the day's warmth for even an hour past sunset. Its ground ice is old enough to count as geology. Noon on Sardain is a bright dusk, and the long day hides nothing (Shown to the Sky). Water is a mineral there. What runs in the Ilveth, and in the life they came from, is a solvent that is not water. That is a statement about chemistry, not a translation slipping (What a Life Is Built From).

The thin air will not carry a useful flame. Open fire on Sardain is a laboratory curiosity, feeble and expensive, and the Ilveth show it to visitors as one. Rain, mist and steam are rare: the record says a wet sky almost never matters on dry Sardain.

The Sky as a Sink

Under a clear Sardain night the open sky is the deepest cold in the world, and it draws warmth out of everything that faces it. Sardain's cultures agree on very little, and they agree on this: shelter is not about wind. It is about not showing the sky your heat. The stars were never hidden from the Ilveth's small photic eyes. They were beside the point, since a sky that holds no warmth holds nothing to want. Astronomy came late on Sardain, through instruments, as a discipline of the cold.

The Warmth Underground

What Sardain holds instead of fire is old warmth underground, in geothermal provinces where the biosphere has always crowded. Ilveth industry went down after it: deep heat-mines, buried working floors, metal made slowly and kept close, and insulation raised to the level other civilisations reserve for art. The record and the Ilveth both speak of that warm ground by province. Suvra Kel kept the boundary watch of one before the survey came. Idrun Hesk seals a buried working floor in another, and says the finest thing she knows how to say of a place is that one could cross it at night and see nothing.

To eyes that see heat, a working forge is visible across a day's travel, and a warm building at night is a building shouting. So heat-thrift on Sardain carries the moral weight other cultures give honesty. Nothing warm crosses the world unobserved.

Being Reached

The Ilveth did not go out. The survey came to Sardain, and contact proceeded from there. The first landing party set down on a plain at horizon distance from a province, and was watched from there for three days before anyone in it knew the world was inhabited. The record leaves that landing undated, and Idrun Hesk's account does the same.

What the Record Does Not Hold

Sardain's star by name or number, 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 its air and of the solvent its life runs in. Any named Sardain organism, and how many provinces there are, or the name of any. Whether Sardain is the Ilveth's own name or a rendering; their name for themselves is a warm-write pattern with no click-speech form. How many Ilveth live there. Who speaks for Sardain, which Idrun Hesk says she does not know, and whether it holds any standing in the Federation. When the survey first landed.

See also: The Ilveth (Warm-Eyed), Shown to the Sky, Idrun Hesk, Suvra Kel, The Ladder in Other Tongues, What a Life Is Built From, Habitable, for Whom.