Cyfnoi Moons
The Cyfnoi Moons are Gethen’s eight largest moons. Each of them is controlled by one of the eight Catallax colleges and features a campus designed specifically to progress the main academic mission of that college.
Luneta
Luneta is the largest of the Cyfnoi moons, making it Gethen’s largest moon overall, as well as the one with the most distant orbit. It’s the most important of the Cyfnoi moons to the Catallax’s studies. Administered by Coronal College, Luneta is famous for All-College Observatory, a city-sized campus devoted to the astronomy of the Conflux. As the name suggests, All-College Observatory is open to scholars from any Catallax college, not only Coronal, and it’s the only Cyfnoi moon where each Catallax college maintains a significant presence.
Coronal College’s founding idea is that the answer to the mystery of the Conflux is that it’s in a time loop. Coronal is obsessed with astronomy because recording the movements of heavenly bodies can reveal the Conflux’s distant past, which, if the Conflux really is in a time loop, would also allow Coronal to predict the future. This idea is depicted in Coronal’s sigil: It looks like a caduceus, except instead of two snakes, it’s a single eel that wraps around to eat its own tail, and instead of a staff, the eel is wrapping itself around a naval spyglass oriented with the wide end upward, with an ornate crown-like design at the top running along the spyglass’s circumference.
All-College Observatory has most of the best astronomers in the Conflux along with leading engineers specializing in optical and other types of sensors. It contains numerous large ground-based telescopes and data centers to collect information from satellite- and drone-based scope and sensor arrays. This work is crucial because the cosmic rays from the Engine Star blur and distort all kinds of sensors, including optical ones, creating an effect called “sensor horizon” that represents the limit at which objects can be distinguished from the Conflux’s background noise. One of the driving goals of All-College Observatory is to draw from the best minds across all the Catallax colleges to advance sensor technology and push the sensor horizon farther out.
At All-College Observatory’s center is Farsight Tower, a telescope the size of a skyscraper designed to look like Coronal’s eel-and-spyglass sigil. The “spyglass” part is a functional telescope 108 stories tall, while the “eel” winding around it houses offices and labs. At the bottom is a massive dome with huge machines to rotate the entire complex and tilt the Tower in either direction. Continually upgraded with the latest technology, Farsight Tower can identify objects at a far greater distance than any other telescope in the Conflux. Farsight Tower and other, somewhat smaller skyscraper-scale telescopes make up All-College Observatory’s unique skyline.
Roda
Roda is the Cyfnoi moon run by Mather College, the Catallax college dedicated to the idea that the Conflux is some sort of promised land. It’s a religious center and one of the most revered places in the Catallax’s Manifold Voyage philosophy. Adherents call themselves “Voyagers,” and they make pilgrimage to the holy city of Innashtar to record their “witness” of the miracles and anomalies of the Conflux into data cylinders that are plugged permanently into a network called the Great Codex.
The scholars of Innashtar live a monastic existence, spending their lives combing through the Great Codex to sort fact from fiction and compile new religious and philosophical texts. Recorded witnesses are never deleted, but those deemed implausible or disproven are labeled apocrypha, while those that are deemed likely or confirmed are called gospels. Mather scholars at Innashtar try to find patterns emerging from these gospels to create religious and philosophical arguments. Most Voyagers consider these writings from Innashtar as the most authoritative, giving Mather College the most influence over the Manifold Voyage religion, a position the college zealously protects.
Mather College’s symbols are the turtle and the wheel, and the central landmark in Innashtar is the massive Dome of Seasons, sculpted like a turtle shell built on a wheel. It rotates slowly, making one revolution every standard year. These “seasons” are based on a religious calendar, with eight season in total, one for each Catallax college. There are eight plazas circling the Dome, each featuring one of the eight colleges’ symbols. When the Dome’s main entrance turns to point at a particular plaza, it marks the season where Voyagers are expected to focus on reading and reflecting on the teachings of that college—although the other colleges sometimes resent that Mather tends to emphasize the writings that dovetail with Mather’s own.
Martelo
Martelo is the Cyfnoi moon run by Elihu College, which believes that the Engine Star and Nephelium somehow played a key role in the Big Bang. Elihu’s mission is to study Nephelium artifacts and create Enigmata to unlock the secrets and power of Creation. At some point in the past, Martelo suffered the same kind of Nephelium impact event that turned the formerly lush Isan homeworld Alma into the cursed graveworld of Karsa.
The surface of Martelo is toxic and uninhabitable. Most people on Martelo live on an arcology called the Hammer, a mile-high tower with a silhouette resembling a hammerhead shark, the symbol of Elihu College. The “hammerhead” section of the Hammer contains terraces of specialized solar panels designed to capture energy from the Engine Star used to refine Nephelium. It channels this energy into a particle accelerator that runs through the center of the Hammer’s tower all the way down to an underground complex underneath it called the Anvil. The Hammer and Anvil are together the most important research Nephelium refinery in the Conflux, designed to create small amounts of extremely refined Nephelium rather than large quantities of less-potent Nephelium produced by industrial-scale refineries elsewhere.
The scientists and engineers who live on the Hammer are some of the best Enigmata inventors in the Conflux, with access to the best source of highly refined Nephelium. The Enigmata they create have proven so powerful that, after an accident nearly toppled the Hammer, Elihu College instituted a research protocol requiring all Enigmata testing to occur offsite in sealed underground testing facilities or orbital testing stations.
Arpao
Arpao is the Cyfnoi moon run by Braunstain College, which believes that the Conflux is a nexus within the multiverse where the border between the “real” timeline and other possible timelines is blurred by the energy of the Engine Star and the Nephelium it creates. Most visitors are lured to Arpao by the Lucreum, a pleasure city full of casinos and other entertainment built by Braunstain. The Lucreum is highly profitable for Braunstain, but its real purposes is to induce people to gamble there, use omnipresent surveillance to record all of it, and test Nephelium technology designed to manipulate probability by allowing parallel universes to bleed into the real one. The people vacationing at the Lucreum have no idea their luck is being manipulated by Nephelium fields, as it’s a tightly held secret shared only on a need-to-know basis with Braunstain academics who’ve proven their trustworthiness to the college. (This probability manipulation isn’t primarily designed to give the house an advantage or cheat players, but rather to test whether the technology itself works and further refine it.) Even senior faculty at the other colleges only have inklings about what the Lucreum is really for, with most dismissing it as a tawdry fundraising scheme to raise grant and scholarship money.
The main landmark and premier casino hotel in the Lucreum is called the Narwhal. It’s a huge building in the shape of a narwhal, laid out horizontally and partially submerged in an artificial lake that serves as one of the Conflux’s largest aquariums. The gaming halls feature cutaways allowing the aquarium’s marine life to swim through the halls behind glass, and the Narwhal’s outer walls feature large panes of glass to observe animals brought there from throughout the Conflux.
Arpao has the lowest orbit over Gethen among the Cyfnoi moons, and Braunstain takes advantage of this to launch missions into Gethen’s atmosphere to investigate the stories of sailors who venture into Gethen and return with tall tales of seeing multiple versions of events happen at once. Most famously, a Feron Wasp called the Occitra chased an Isan D-Type cruiser called the Mudskipper into Gethen, and both ships emerged with each crew claiming it had destroyed the enemy ship in the ensuing battle. These ships became a Conflux-wide laughingstock because every crew member of each ship swore they’d won the battle, but Braunstain researchers believe that two versions of this battle occurred, and somehow the winner of the battle in a parallel universe crossed over into the “real” timeline. The gases that make up Gethen’s roiling storm are also a key component of the probability-manipulating technology developed at the Lucreum, and these missions also allow Braunstain to secretly collect it without raising eyebrows by making large orders through the Knot.
Cutelo
Cutelo (pronounced “KOO-tello”) is the Cyfnoi moon run by Kenmouth College, which believes in transcendence through body modification. The Kenmouth campus on Cutelo is called the Gethen Institute for Metasomatics, and it’s the main production and testing facility for Catallax bionics and cybernetics outside Arlayas. Much of the campus is devoted to the Bodyworks, a sea of factories producing artificial limbs, brain implants, and other biotech devices, mostly for export back to Arlayas but occasionally finding their way to the Knot’s black markets.
Cutelo is popularly known for the Proving Grounds, a vast swath of arenas and obstacle courses used to test and benchmark Kenmouth’s technology. Kenmouth’s sigil is a marlin with a bill in the shape of a cutlass, and the central athletic complex in the Proving Grounds features a colossal sculpture titled “The Breach,” which depicts that sigil as a breaching marlin with its cutlass-bill pointed skyward and scales made from shiny, coruscating metals. The Proving Grounds is the site of the Metahuman Games, the premier athletic competition allowing most types of bionics and cybernetics, open to all athletes in the Conflux. The Metahuman Games became especially popular after the War, because many veterans returned home with war wounds requiring implants or full-replacement bionic limbs: In the Metahuman Games, having artificial body parts is not only normal but celebrated as a new form of human evolutionary progress.
Canhao
Canhao, the Cyfnoi Moon run by Silviana College, is an object of superstition throughout the Conflux. Silviana College is built around the idea of using Nephelium-based technology to achieve transcendence through mutation and genetic modification.
Silviana’s main campus on Canhao sits above an underground hollow known as the Rootbound Necropolis. Above this hollow is a vast forest of wraithtrees, whose root systems coil down below, guided by scaffolds built by Silviana’s workers. Wherever the roots stretch, Silviana places special coffins designed with openings to let the roots grow directly into the bodies held inside. When the roots enter, these bodies stop decomposing, and instead continuously replicate genetic material from the dead body which is drawn up through the wraithtrees’ roots. This genetic material finds its way into the wraithfruit these trees produce. Wraithfruit is deadly to eat, but Silviana technology can extract the genetic material inside to use in its mutation and gene-manipulation experiments. The Rootbound Necropolis is continually growing, with both Catallax and non-Catallax alike donating their remains to be interred there, a massive underground field of undecaying bodies with their genes living on forever.
Working in the Necropolis or the wraithtree forest above isn’t for the faint of heart: Even hardheaded Catallax scientists have stories of seeming to see human faces or limbs in the wood of the wraithtrees, and when strong wind blows through them, the wraithtrees make a human-like keening noise. Wraithtrees can grow to massive size—as big as real-life sequoias—with pale, ashen wood and leaves colored heather gray, purple, and charcoal, capturing a different part of the Engine Star’s spectrum from ordinary chlorophyll. A popular hazing ritual for newcomers to Canhao is to have them take a certain Nephelium drug then wander through the great wraithwood forest: The drug makes the bark appear translucent, and the hapless user hallucinates the shapes of masses of corpses churning and writhing just within. This ritual isn’t so popular with the victims, many of whom request transfers shortly after they recover.
Anzol
Anzol is the Cyfnoi moon run by Dauffendorf College, which believes in transcendence through mind modification. Dauffendorf is known primarily for its advancements in kubern technology, with newer interfaces allowing kuberns to better sync their mind with the ship’s computer systems, stay in the interface longer without suffering a mental break, and stave off the long-term psychological effects of Nephelium-drive navigation. Dauffendorf also develops other types of mind-machine interfaces, for applications like controlling mechs, industrial equipment, or other machines that need to go somewhere it wouldn’t be safe to bring manned vehicles.
The Dauffendorf campus on Anzol, Midcastle, is built at a juncture of a mountain range and cave system, both rich in conventional and Nephelium-infused ores and minerals. The mines built into the mountains and the cave system are collectively known as the Sandbox, where engineers test the mind-machine interfaces they create, as well as train new operators, by having them pilot unmanned mechs and mining vehicles into the mines to build structures and extract raw materials. These mind-machine interfaces depend on physical cables to connect the operator to the machine, and Dauffendorf builds great spools of thick, tough industrial-grade cable that allows these machines to delve deep below Anzol’s surface.
Dauffendorf’s sigil is a manta ray with a hook at the end of its tail, and Midcastle is best known for the Kite, a huge, functional flying sculpture. It’s called the Kite because it’s connected to Midcastle by a miles-long cable that allows a ground-based pilot to operate it. Flying the Kite is a great honor granted only to top Dauffendorf students or, of course, major donors.
Ancora
Ancora is the Cyfnoi moon run by Ezreal College, which believes that the Engine Star and the Conflux represent a kind of puzzle that allows those who solve it to transcend their humanity. Further, Ezreal believes that the experiences of kuberns can provide some of the missing pieces. Idlewild, Ezreal’s campus on Ancora, is dedicated to rehabilitating kuberns and trying to understand their experiences.
Ezreal’s sigil is a whale with an anchor-shaped tail, and Ancora’s most recognizable landmark is Whalebone Cathedral, built from a giant whale fossil excavated from Pontifex Bay on Carannon and shipped across the Conflux to Idlewild. The bones are arranged into a skeleton, with walls in between to form the structure of the cathedral. Visitors enter through the whale’s mouth, then follow a winding path through the cathedral, with stations throughout to pause, reflect, and pray, leading back out of the whale’s mouth.
While many Voyagers and tourists walk the Whalebone Cathedral, it was made specifically as a therapeutic exercise for kuberns. When kuberns link into ships, they feel as though the ship is their body: Armored, bristling with guns, and so fast. Over time, kuberns come to think of the ship as their real body and hate their “human form.” The idea of the whale walk is to allow kuberns to feel swallowed up by the whale—insignificant compared to the colossal super-whale that makes up the Cathedral—and reorient their perspective to relearn how to live life at human scale.
Ezreal studies the sensory experiences of kuberns, debriefing them during the rehabilitation process to understand how it feels to jump a ship across a cosmic void. Each kubern describes this feeling differently, but over the course of interviewing thousands of retired kuberns after the War, some patterns emerged. Many kuberns compared the process of plotting an FTL jump as something like pulling on, following, or tracing a thread, with countless such threads crisscrossing space. This has led to Ezreal study the possibility that Nephelium drives work using invisible leylines that only a kubern linked to a Nephelium drive can perceive. Further, Ezreal neurologists studying kuberns who pushed themselves too far and descended into kubern madness, raving about strange and impossible sights, may not be mad at all. They attempt to treat them with mind-healing Nephelium drugs, in some cases restoring mad kuberns to occasional moments of lucidity, in which their fragmented visions cohere into prophecies of a coming Fall.
100 Smugglers’ Moons
The hundred “Smugglers’ Moons” are Gethen’s frontier. They’re uncharted and only inhabited, if at all, by hermits, thieves, and pirates. One of these moons might have no permanent settlements at all, or anything from a shotgun shack to a smuggler’s stash to a separatist-survivalist compound to a crime lord’s fortress.