Timekeeping

 Sunrise and sunset? Nay, we have rosris (ROZE-eye) and rodin (ROW-din).

What follows is a sort of haphazard study of timekeeping in Roselight, and its relationship to the culture of the Rosa system’s inhabitants. As some ground rules, I’m going to maintain the use of hours, minutes, and seconds, but everything else…….we’ll see. Also, be advised this was all typed at like 3 AM so it may or may not be totally coherent.

I think irid’An has a day length similar enough to Earth that the people there can live a recognizable day/night schedule; maybe substantially shorter than ours, like 14 or 15 hours, where people sleep shorter intervals or maybe alternate whether they sleep a given day or not. I think the natural diurnal functions in our brains are probably more receptive to short sleep periods whenever it gets dark (4 to 5 hours?) so that would likely be the norm on irid’An. Shorter days but a pretty recognizable cycle.

On this world, the physical day/night cycle can just be referred to as consisting of calendar days, which would be the system-wide standard for timekeeping (dates, events, trade, economy, stonks). This is fun from a narrative standpoint as well because it sets the stage for the almost oblivious influence the people of irid’An have over the rest of the system. They’re privileged with a lifestyle that feels so pleasantly familiar that they’ve never known the fundamental upheaval of basic existence that others have had to endure.

On Orus the situation is quite different. The day/night cycle is more like weather variation on a weeklong timescale, not something rapid enough to build a sleep schedule based on. So, as mentioned before, people here probably run on irid’An time. Their clocks would be synchronized, despite the time delay ruling out real-time communications anyways. So people probably rise and sleep on similar schedules to irid’An, perhaps sleeping for longer during the nights and shorter during the days. Here we will need to distinguish between physical day/night and the calendar days.

I’ve been trying to figure out a good alternate name for a calendar day, like “sol,” so that “day” and “night” can mean light and dark. But what if we take the opposite approach? Rename the periods of light and dark on Orus, since in a way they’re more like seasons than days. The climate changes for a significant period of time, but the cycle of life continues. Daytime approaches and shifts into nighttime even as multiple “days” go by. What could we call these periods?

“Vigil” is a phenomenal name for the nighttime on Orus. Continuing the theme of liturgical hours, I like “Laude” for the daytime, but I’d honestly prefer something less biblical for both inclusion and realism (how many thousands of years has it been by now?). I’ll noodle on it some more.

Despite human society being focused on irid’An, while colonization of Orus occurred within the last 100 years or so, people have still developed new cultures and customs suited to this unique world. You’ll find the use of Vigil and Laude to be more prevalent the further you go from ASMC’s upper brass. Those closer to the company (and thus further from the world itself) view these new customs as frivolous and meaningless, while the people in villages and communities most removed from ASMC (like Noira’s friends) have already been raised under these traditions. They began among the working class who sought to make a home of this world they were contractually bound to, and have since spread to people who don’t work for ASMC at all. Noira herself is in the odd position of having lived on Orus for some time, but still being a relative outsider to the inner culture here. She’s largely been a working immigrant to the world, and so spent most of her time in a heavily company-controlled life.

On pr’Sefone things are even stranger, albeit simpler. Rosa does not rise or set, and this world’s orbit is too tightly shepherded after billions of years of resonance to have any appreciable eccentricity. So the only way to keep time is to look beyond Rosa, to the other worlds. Timekeeping here is marked primarily by the passage of irid’An in the sky, as this would’ve been the most important celestial object to the Sefones during the flightless era. This is a lot like how the month on Earth is based on the cycle of the moon, but instead of being something like an orbit, a “month” here might refer to the synodic period of pr’Sefone and irid’An. These worlds’ motion relative to each other repeats on a set timescale that both worlds could observe, so this might even be a formalized calendar definition as well. Actually, the synodic period is very important for spaceflight, so once interworld travel returns this would be a crucial measurement of time.

I’m not sure what wake/sleep periods look like on pr’Sefone – naturally, the onset of “globalization” (multiple globes in this case) means most people on pr’Sefone just follow regular irid’An time, but I wonder what the Sefones did while they were mostly out of contact with irid’An. Maybe people slept in rounds or shifts, set to a natural division of the synodic month. This could be a good tie-in to some of their cultural quirks about vigilance and the constant presence of Roselight in their lives; as Rosa never rests her watchful eye, neither must the Sefones. The influence of universal irid’An time thus becomes an existential threat to a huge part of Sefones culture. This would be a fun thing to explore amidst Noira’s immediate family – maybe some of her younger siblings have already taken on more responsible roles in the family, as someone needs to remain awake and watchful as their mother Telma sleeps.

So that gives us some semblance of an understanding as to timekeeping and its cultural implications in Roselight. I need to sleep soon but my next aim is to try and craft a more comprehensive calendar. Some notes for then include the fact that the planets are probably in resonant orbits, due to the compact size of the system, which may help to keep timekeeping nice and neat.