Registro Aura

What is the Registro Aura?

It is the catalogue of the first survey of the Aurin system. It was drawn up by the Flota Aura, the fleet that brought the settlers, in Year 0 E.A., the year they arrived. E.A. stands for Años de Asentamiento, the settlers’ calendar.

It was made with telescopes and mass models, before anyone had landed anywhere. In other words, it was estimated from afar. It classified each body by the ending of its name, which served as a data sheet. Settlers still read those endings without noticing.

What do the name endings mean?

Suffix	What it meant	Examples
-era / -a	Candidate with a biosphere	Ithera, Solmera, Melvara
-is	Arid, rich in minerals	Kharsis
-ek	Hostile seen from afar, no landing clearance	Kaldrek, Ormek, Ordrek
-ane	Satellite catalogued from afar	Selvane, Tirane, Kravane
-ar / -un	Captured body or body with an unresolved orbit	Ashkar, Renvar, Kharun
-in / -ion	Primary object	Aurin, Parhelion

What did it get wrong?

By the Registro’s reckoning, only two planets were habitable: Ithera and Kharsis. It gave the other two the suffix -ek, the one for hostile worlds:

• Ormek. From a distance all anyone could see was a blinding white disc. The Registro took it for a world on fire. It was a veil of cloud, and underneath there was air.
• Kaldrek. It got its -ek for the glow of its fissures and its amber sky. Under its haze there was breathable air too.

Both guesses fell at the first landing: all four planets turned out to be habitable. The Zenith, one of the system’s two sides, went down to Ormek against the Registro’s verdict. They were the first to find its air, and they built the Colector Solar Prima there, which captures energy for half the system.

The suffix stuck, but its meaning changed. Settlers now read -ek as “hard world” rather than “forbidden world”. Ordrek, a moon with no air, is hard but not hostile.

Some estimates were right. The Registro put Ithera at 0.94 g. It put the asteroid Ashkar at about 0.03 m/s². Later measurements bore both out.

Which names break the pattern?

The names that break the pattern give away their date:

• Erran, Pyra and Cinera were not in the Registro at all. They were added later.
• Melvara was catalogued as a world. Then it turned out to orbit Ithera, and it was crossed out by hand.

That crossing-out is now the most expensive legal argument in the system. The Armisticio de Ithera, the pact that stopped the war, forbids militarising Ithera’s orbit. Melvara is in that orbit. But it measures 1,950 km and has its own horizon. In thirty-five years, no lawyer has persuaded the other side that this counts as “orbit”.

Both factions have settled on the same answer on Melvara. Each has a “strictly civilian” installation:

• the Observatorio Cumbre, belonging to the Zenith;
• the Casa de Piedra, belonging to the Nadir, the other side.

They stand four hundred kilometres apart, with no line of sight. They keep watch on each other by radio, and neither has ever fired. Between them the five Guilds, which belong to neither side, built El Fiel. It is an inspection station with its doors always open. Its only job is to count what goes in.

What lesson did it leave?

The Registro is the system’s first document and its first shared mistake. The Pathfinders, the explorers’ guild, quote it as a warning: an estimate from afar holds until someone goes down and measures.

That distrust produced the Tabla de Fases, the table of the moons’ orbits, measured rather than calculated. The Pathfinders measure it body by body under a three-word principle: “measured, not derived”.

They have not been immune to error either. Forty years after the war they dated the metal in the Anillos de Kaldrek. That metal was scrap from Year 1, and they concluded that the ring was, above all, war scrap. But the ring, which was already there when the Fleet arrived, is Mornane, a moon that died millions of years ago. The file on the moons sums it up: “They measured what shone, not what was there.”