by Arturo Sierra
Those who take an interest in the strange and fascinating matter of birthdays find few such peculiar cases as Turnagún. This out-of-the-way world, generally insignificant in the affairs of the wider galaxy, nevertheless makes two claims to fame. First, that the inhabitants are notorious for the violence they visit upon outsiders, though admittedly they haven’t had much contact with the outside. Only three visitations on record, in fact. Still, no one had a good time of it.
Secondly, Turnagún is famous for having the most convoluted calendar known to the sages. Some scholars, who can be trusted not to make stuff up, maintain both these peculiarities of Turnagúnian culture are connected. It’s no wonder, since the world is a moon-moon, or what’s known as a submoon, a moon of a moon, a subsatellite in orbit around a super-earth which, in turn, orbits a Jovian with nineteen masses-of-Jupiter. The super-earth is called Kalgán, and it dominates the skies of its attendant, crawling slowly across the heavenly dome. Meanwhile, the Jovian is named Úb, and most local religions call it the abode of the gods, unsurprisingly. In the sky, it looms and lurks behind Kalgán, scattering fortunes in its path.
The inhabitants are solemn and taciturn, but their bodies move with gentle grace, almost floating in the low gravity, and they perform every action with ritualistic care. That they are prey to a kind of superstitious neurosis is the worst that can be said of them. They are xenophobes, but they have not indulged in any frenzy of interstellar extermination, like the Kröshtlolammitans, who are sworn not to rest until they annihilate all sapient species, including themselves. No, Turnagún’s perversity runs deeper than all that, and it’s only discovered by tracing the paths that crisscross its firmament.
The jovian-moon-submoon system that is Úb-Kalgán-Turnagún goes tumbling around Túus and Ébo, a G-class sun and a dim red dwarf, respectively. A third star, the cold and faint white dwarf called Ħaâħ, encloses the system inside a steeply inclined orbit. Common knowledge has it that catastrophe accompanies Ħaâħ, the Dreadful Eye, during its approach to the inner system once every other century. For its part, Úb has a highly excentric orbit for a life-bearing planet. Depending on the alignment of all these celestial bodies, sunsets on Turnagún can turn out pink like roses for lovers, red like blood-pacts with demons, or they can drown in a green hue reminiscent of watered-down chard soup.
Coming to the matter of birthdays, then. Turnagún experiences three yearly cycles simultaneously: short, long, and super. Accordingly, a birthday happens—or, rather, befalls a Turnagúnian, when the world completes an orbit around Kalgán, which is a short year. A short year lasts only a few minutes less than a day on the moon-moon, it being nearly tidally locked, but not quite. Annual birthdays, then, come almost every day. Days, of course, do not correspond with sunsets and sunrises, since the world’s spin is not what causes the sun to move across the sky, but instead it’s the procession of the moon-moon’s parent around its own Jovian parent what brings about the sunrise. To make up for that, a year will have at least one sunset at some point during the day. Unless, of course, the suns are eclipsed by either the parent moon or the Jovian, in which case the second trimester might be the day’s second nighttime. Then again, a day could have more than just one sunset, depending on the cosmic dance, so there’s the bright side. You can go ahead and make yourself a sketch, if you think it would help—it won’t.
Meanwhile, a long birthday befalls once every Kalgánian year, when the super-earth goes around the Jovian, Úb. Unfortunately, Kalgán’s orbit is much faster than Turnagún’s. To spell it out clearly: the long year is shorter than the short year, and the year is shorter than the day, but only by a few minutes, and also depending on which year one is talking about, the long or the short, the long being some hours shorter than a day, and none of these having anything to do with the coming and going of summer and winter, which follows the Úbian year, which is none of the above.
The milestone of a long birthday is too frequent to be much celebrated, and not even short birthdays are considered worthy of great fanfare, though cake does take place, traditionally. We note in passing that Turnagúnians don’t have sweet tastebuds, so the cakes in question are sad, salty affairs. In any case, it’s so difficult to guess the right day without some serious arithmetic, that not being able to remember one’s own age is considered the mark of adulthood.
And if the matter were laid to rest here, it could be handled like any other migraine. But we still must consider the super-year of Úb going around the binary stars. At this point, it is customary for the author to solicit the reader’s patience while a complex matter is explained, but in this case the recommendation is that the next paragraph be skipped by those who prefer avoiding the risk of an aneurism.
On all manner of worlds, civilizations mark the solstice. These are celebrated because they are important for agriculture, or simply because they are worth noticing. Turnagúnians are burdened with the linestice, when Turnagún, Kalgán and Úb form a straight line—it turns into a prolinestice when the stars Túus and Ébo fall into this line behindÚb, and a retrolinestice when the stars are on the opposite side. There’s summer and winter linestices of both kinds. It must be taken into account whether Turnagún is sandwiched between Kalgán and Úb, or if it’s Kalgán in the middle, and all the variants of these celestial events when it comes to the perpendicularstice.
Complications are compounded by the inclination of the orbits of Turnagún around Kalgán, the inclination of Kalgán’s orbit in the Úb system, and Úb’s inclination in the plane of the planets, of which there’s a damnably large number, not to mention the 38° angle to the ecliptic of the Túus-Ebo orbit around the pair’s common center of mass. The third star, Ħâħ, blazes into the dance, too, turning astronomical pandemonium into something no devil would want any part in. Then we come to consider the tangentinox, the intersectionox, the diametrictictonox and the radionox, and don’t forget the chordstice and the secantstice.
Unsurprisingly, there has never been a form of government in Turnagún that was not an astrologocracy, meaning government by astrologers. It’s natural: as on every planet, civilization is highly dependent on where things stand in the sky. Farmers must know when to plant and harvest; fishermen need to know at what depth the sea-parrots swim, which depends on the various lights in the night’s sky; hospital workers want to know when to expect an uptick in admissions, and everyone benefits from knowing that they have been feeling down only because of seasonal mood-swings. Not to mention, there’s an understandable interest in predicting earthquake season in a tectonically active world.
So, there’s that, but also, and this is the crux of the issue, everyone knows someone who got married against the advice of an astrologer, like when Úb was on the right side of Kalgán and Ébo was on the left of Túus just after the equianglistice, and the marriage was a disaster, they divorced and the kids are just the worst. Everyone has an uncle who bought a house during a retrolinestice, which is a no-no according to common astrological wisdom, and the house burnt down thereafter; the insurance company wouldn’t cover. Everyone has a sister-in-law who invested while Ébo was eclipsed by Ub’s second moon counting outwards on a winter radionox, and she lost everything. When the conversation turns to politics over Sunday-family-lunch, one can frequently hear opinions to the effect that when parliament last discussed tax reform, it was a Kalgánian month that started during the first quarter of the short year while it was nighttime, and look what we got for that bit of trouble, a recession, see if you think it’s such a good idea to keep horoscopes out of politics.
The thing is, on Turnagún astrologers are not merely taking advantage of confirmation bias. They follow the strictest rules of scientific discovery. They postulate a hypothesis, say, for example, that the second tangentonox after a linestice is a bad moment to get a haircut. They then collect a dataset of people who cut their hair during such an occasion, they collate and compare with data gathered at other times, they make and test predictions, and only then will they announce a new fortunetelling. If the astrological community agrees with the findings, the fortune is added to the Almanac.
Turnagúnian astrologers are proven right with a frequency and precision that can’t be done away with as statistical artifact or the result of vagueness. Over there, astrologers win at the horse track 79% more often than the average gambler. And, unlike elsewhere, they do not feel like they can’t access the mystical forces while in the presence of a disbeliever. It’s just a question whipping out calculator and sextant, do some advanced trigonometry, and there you go: it’s Neightime Fun to come in first in the third race.
Yet astrologers are not considered a lucky bunch, and hardly anyone wants to join the profession. They are blighted by mental health issues, paranoia being one of the main concerns, together with late-onset dyscalculia, anxiety-induced alopecia, and sleepwalking. Most omens, it is said, are bad omens, and most good omens are just bad omens read backwards.
When the Ambassador for the Galactic Community made contact with the Turnagúnians, at first she was received quite politely. At some point, however, the Ambassador was explaining about the wider universe, most of which can’t be seen from Turnagún because of the Nebula. She told them that the Galaxy is a great disc of stars spinning around a central bulge, and at that very moment the attitude changed. She was told to go away and never, ever come back. It seemed like a puzzling overreaction, at first, until it was noticed that the galactic year is not accounted for in the Turnagúnian cosmology.
The second outsider was a missionary. He landed, preached for a bit, got to the part about God stopping the sun in its track—a myth found everywhere among mono-helionic cultures—and was told in no uncertain terms that he had about thirty seconds to leave, or else there was going to be trouble.
The third visitation was by a party. They landed their rocket on a beautiful spot at the beach, set up a tent, blasted some beats, opened a thousand bottles of champagne, and put some effort into the concept of having a good time. Suddenly, a dozen Turnagúnians came out of the underbrush, wearing pelts and wielding spears. The party people thought they had stumbled upon uncontacted, pre-tech people, which could add to the entertainment. Only, these natives were not so much awe-struck by the spaceship and the laser-lightshow, as they seemed—one survivor said—like if someone’s dad had shown up to take his vomit-covered disappointment back home. Which is not the attitude you expect to find in a spear-wielder wearing loincloth.
“Hope you don’t mind us landing on your planet unannounced, you know how it is,” the visitors said, quickly moving past the awkwardness of first contact. “Come join us! We’re having a party!”
“What sort of party?” asked the one who seemed to be the leader.
“It’s a party for this one! Get over here, you rascal, meet the locals! It’s his birthday! Today he turns fifty!”
~
Bio:
From Santiago, Chile, Arturo Sierra now has gone out into the world. For the most part, he has led a completely uninteresting life, and, with any luck, it will stay that way.
Philosophy Note:
In a famous quote by Saint Augustine, he claims to know exactly what time is, as long as no one asks him to explain what it is. According to modern physics, time is the thing that’s measured by clocks, and you better stop asking nosy questions before you’re told to mind your own business. Clocks, here, meaning anything that repeats in a pattern, like the phases of the moon, the place where the sun sets, the vibration of a caesium atom, or a spinning pulsar. We were handed a nice clock by nature in the form of our planet’s orbit around the sun, yet still we follow the lunar calendar for religious reasons, and the mismatch gets very confusing, and it still took a long, long time until we got the solar year right, and how come that it used to start snowing in June, when I was a kid, but now it happens in September, and I bet that caught you off guard if you have always lived in the northern hemisphere.
This piece is part of a series of twelve vignettes about the strange and fascinating matter of birthdays as they are celebrated all over the Galaxy. You see, not all clocks are so easy to read, and some have very weird handles.
