Calima
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Calima is the planet where the Calima Saga takes place. The Pioneers space mission travelled there to colonize it.[1]
It lies in a future time, and a lot of concepts differ from the ones we are used to in the present: language, environment... even some aspects of the human morphology.[2]
Language
The words spoken in Calima are older than anyone who uses them. They were made by the ancestors (or the old gods, or the dreamers, depending on who you ask) whose world was not this one, for things that time contained and this one does not. Those things are gone... probably. The words have stayed, though.
These are not translations, because nobody noticed there was anything to translate. Some words have changed over the cycles because the old terms were too strange or went out of style. Others are still used today because their meaning was powerful and clear enough that nobody needed to invent another.
The language of the ancestors was not one but many, and some kept words that described an idea perfectly, while others simply fancied how they sounded.[3]
In Descent (2258)
Calima is the destination of the Pioneers mission: a satellite tidally locked to the metal-rich rocky planet Rubra Fulgur I, which is in turn locked to the red dwarf Rubra Fulgur. It is named after the permanent fog that covers the lower layer of its atmosphere, a word for a kind of sea haze from the region of the Asturian astrophysicist who discovered it.
Description
Discovered nearly 5000 cycles before the book, Calima stood out as an excellent candidate: gravity only 4% higher than Earth's, a narrow temperature range of 10 to 25 degrees, and water over almost all of its surface. Its atmosphere is breathable in the lower layers, but only for a few hours, because of its argon and neon; the crew will need lung gene therapy. As the ship approaches, cyclical changes in its CO2 suggest life.
In the story
On the ground the fog starts to blur everything at 20 metres and is impenetrable at 50; it is white below and reddish towards the sky, darker at night, and thins where wood is burnt. A planetary cycle, one day and night, lasts about 10.11 hours, and a full turn around the star 103 planetary cycles. The land where the survivors come down is karstic and fractured, with cliffs, caves, streams and hot springs, a light subtropical forest and its own animals, among them the Kutsanp, the Gecko, the Karmabog and the Vaghadata.