All Precious Stones and Peoples
All Precious Stones and Peoples is a novella in the Timelines series. It takes place on the planet Coleridge (which orbits the B2.5 star Nunki (Sigma Sagittarii) approximately 228-250 ly from Sol), and is (1) a follow-on to A Huntress On The Rocks and (2) a sort of prequel to The Lion and the Logic.
Characters
Ta'at'iki -- Astronomer; later Chief Astronomer
Ha'at'kiti -- Assistant Astronomer; later Senior Astronomer
Tama'ita'i -- The Foretold One, the Saintess, Speaker to the Dry Ones. Youngest child of Ta'at'iki and Ha'at'kiti.
Ta'pa'kia'i -- Her older brother; middle child at the time of the story. Has something of a sister complex about Tama'ita'i.
Ke'ma'a'ki -- Her older sister; eldest child of the family.
Terminology
The language of the People mostly follows a phonology similar to that of the Hawai'ian language. There are only a few consonants -- roughly, p, k, t, h, m, n, l, r, w and v, along with a glottal stop (ʔ, IPA 113). The vowels are much the same as those in Japanese, with long, medium, and short versions (so, 5 vowels voiced as many as 15 different ways). Of course all of this is transliterated from the clicks and chirps and squeaks of the actual language used by the dolphin-like People.
The language of the Progenitors is/was a human-type language, with consonant and vowel structures similar to those of Western languages. This language can't be spoken by the People, but it is taught in the schools because of the sheer amount of literature written in that language. (It should be noted that Tama'ita'i can speak both the Progenitor language and the language of the People properly.)
A'ka'pa'i'ka'ti -- The People. This is a corrupted form of "A'akapiei'ida". "A'ka'pa'i" comes from the original form and "'ka'ti" is a somewhat debased form of the local dialect meaning "lost ones". It goes back to the half-formed idea I have that the A'ka'pa'i'ka'ti were a group of A'akapiei'ida who were lost in space after a catastrophic singularity drive failure, and ended up colonizing a planet in some unknown corner of the universe after being unable to repair or replace the drive. Which is why they exist despite the idea that only the A'akapiei'ida and the Darkness are "native" to our bubble universe, and all the other races were created in the Simulation later. The term A'ka'pa'i'ka'ti applies to both the original human-like and gene-altered dolphin-like versions of the lost group.
ik'ka'ta -- megawhales
a'i'ka'te'ru -- typhoon, often super-typhoon
World Ocean
Time
A Cycle is one revolution around Coleridge's star. This takes 2,050 Earth years (the planet is 320 AU from its primary). A Smallcycle approximates the People's original year prior to the visitation -- the fourth planet circled its sun in about 627 T-standard days, or 519 Turnings/Coleridge days (and this is the way the People count their ages). A Great Cycle is 1000 Cycles (2,050,000 Earth years), and a Greater Cycle is ten Great Cycles (20,500,000 Earth years).
A Turning is one of Coleridge's 29-hour (T-standard) days. A Great Turning is a thousand days. A Greater Turning is a thousand thousand (a million) days. This makes a Turning about 1.21 T-standard days, and a Smallcycle is thus about 1.42 T-standard years. (The time between Coleridge's discovery by humans (2047 AD) and the advent of Tama'ita'i the Saintess's first encounter with a human submersible (2345 AD) is therefore about 209.8 Smallcycles.)
A Cycle as defined above is around 619,241 Coleridge days (748,250 Earth days). Thus a full Cycle consists of just over 60% of a Greater Turning, or as the People would likely put it, about 620 Great Turnings.
History
Records of the People state the planet entered orbit around Nunki about two Cycles ago, or (after doing the conversion math) about 4,100 Earth years ago. Before that, the planet had been floating through space as a rogue for probably close to a million years. Despite the extreme length of time, the People did not experience all of it, having gone into artificial hibernation not long after the World Ocean froze over in the dark and cold of interstellar space. When they neared Nunki, and it appeared they could be captured into its orbit, sufficient engineers were awakened to engage a very weak reactionless drive installed by their human forebears, which helped slow the planet down and shape its orbital entrance accordingly. After that, the rest of the People were awakened and waited patiently under the ice for the planet to warm and thaw. Nunki being a very hot blue-white star, this didn't take long, even at the extreme distance of the planet's new orbit.
It must be said that the reactionless drive was not originally intended to put the planet into its new orbit around a new star (else one might think it could have been used to put them back in orbit around their old star!). Indeed, it had been installed to give the refugees some control over minor changes that had been expected to occur in its orbit around the original star, post-Visitation. After it was clear that the wrong planet was going to be ripped away by the Visitor, there had been much discussion about the possibility of using the drive for the purpose of inserting it into orbit should it chance to pass close enough to another star. And it was judged that the People might have a 10%-15% chance of managing to pull off an orbital insertion around a new star.
In the end they got very lucky and were headed in pretty much the right direction for the drive to pull it off.
Because I had to figure it out for the story: The star they came from is ~86 light years from Nunki. In something like a million years, they traveled 506.6 trillion miles at a speed just over their planet's orbital speed around that star, which was somewhere around 50,000 miles per hour. The Visitor didn't really "tear" the planet away so much as it pulled it gently out of orbit by increasing its orbital speed enough to break orbit and spiral away from the star.
The star they came from is unknown in Earth catalogs because it's been behind Nunki from our perspective for hundreds of years, and the light from blue-giant Nunki probably drowns it out anyway. For the pedantic, it's a G3V, slightly smaller, slightly redder, and slightly cooler than Sol (a G2V).