The World of Tethys
About halfway between a capriciously placed globular cluster and the main body of the galaxy floats a solitary Sol-class star: Caravella. In its temperate zone orbits a single planet, left there after a wandering neutron star tore its two companions out of the system and flung them into interstellar space.
The cluster was named ‘Janus’, after a dual-faced deity of Terran mythology. The namer remains unknown, though it is thought that he was associated with the first colonist arrivals to the Caravella system. It is rumored that he declared, possibly in a spirit of jocosity, that everything of such apparent symmetry must surely conceal an underlying existential antinomy. Hence the name, which was to remind everybody of the discrepancy between appearances and what is often foolishly called ‘truth’.
The planet’s discoverer, one Liander Olan, named the planet ‘Tethys’, for reasons obvious at a glance. It is a water world, dominated by a vast planetary ocean, from which rise several continents, clustered together in one hemisphere; as well as a sprinkle of islands, some of which might qualify as continents, but most of which don’t.
Aslam, the largest continent is a desert, bounded in the coastal areas with rows of shallow mountain ranges. Almost exactly in its center, surrounded by the largest of the deserts, lies a vast kidney-shaped oasis, stretching hundreds of miles from north to south and surrounded by a forbidding mountain range.
Tapide also is a parched desert, with two large coastal oases where human habitation is practical. Both are separated from the bulk of the continent by arcs of tall mountain ranges, which, provide natural barriers against the sands swept up by the storms raging across Tapide’s interior desert plains.
Below Tapide lies Unterthal, once joined to Tapide, until a cataclysmic event split them apart millions of years ago. Unterthal is a land of endless windblown steppes and jagged ranges.
Finister—continent or island?—lies to the west of Tapide, opposite the Valley, across the Limpic Ocean. It is part desert and part mountain ranges, which create complex weather patterns and have led to the development of small regions of fecund plant life of sometimes dazzling beauty.
More islands lie scattered between the two major land masses: Grelande; Cosinante; the Taelinic Group; a plethora of smaller dots and blotches.
The depth of Tethys’s ocean tells the story; once upon a time all of this was a single land mass, much of it now sunk beneath the waves.
The planetary ocean gives Tethys a moderate climate. No icecaps exist. The highest and lowest temperatures are found in the centers of the large continents, whose land masses inject a note of meteorological dissonance and which are the major cause of errant storms and other occasional climatic excesses.
Tethys’s nights are dominated by Janus. Its glow is so intense that it can even be discerned, albeit faintly, in broad daylight. When Janus does not rule the night sky, its place is taken by the broad but faint expanses of the galaxy and the large, dismal void of intergalactic space.
Note on the reckoning of time
Standard time units are defined by reference to those from the human homeworld. They are prefixed by sta, with the actual time unit abbreviated following it, and separated from the sta by an apostrophe or an equally clear and unambiguous separator.
second: sta’sec (plural sta’sec’s)
minute: sta’m (plural sta’m’s)
hour: sta’h (plural sta’h’s)
day: sta’d (plural sta’d’s)
year: sta’y (plural sta’y’s)
Note that ‘week’ and ‘month’ are too ambiguous to standardize in an interstellar civilization context.
A Tethys day is 27.436 sta’h’s, reckoned as 30 ‘local’ hours.
A Tethys year lasts for 482.394 Tethys days. The axis is inclined at ten degrees to the orbital plane, making for seasons of moderate differentiation.