Systems of historical dating used on
Ooranye:
The most commonly used of the three systems is the
era-day count . To see
how this works, let us take a famous date in Uranian history, the day of
First Contact with Terrestrials, which on our calendar took place on 10th July,
3564 A.D. On Ooranye this was the 11,002,739th day of the Actinium
Era and so is referred to simply as 11,002,739 Ac. [Needless to say, when
translating into English we use our own English chemical symbol
for the element for which the era is named;
however, the Uranians' own abbreviations are similar in style to ours.]
The Uranians seem not to feel inconvenienced by the need
to use and remember seven- or eight- or even nine-digit
numbers. This is just as well since their basic unit is the day,
and there are a lot of days in any of the major eras! As for
why they use the day: Ooranye's orbit round the sun takes 84 Earth
years, roughly a lifetime, and so is far too long a period for most
purposes of accurate dating.
However, the Uranian year does have a place in their
culture - an astonishing place, to our way of thinking. The
U-year countdown is a
phenomenon which many Earth minds have found impossible to accept.
It seems as ridiculous as a claim by an archaeologist to have found a
Greek vase inscribed "300 B.C.". Yet the evidence is
incontrovertible: Uranians from the very beginning of their history
have been counting the long
years backwards! During 91 eras they have
experienced this countdown towards the 92nd and Last Era.
The numbers in this system are prefaced in English translation with
the letters UTU [Until the Ultimate or U-years Till the
Ultimate]. Thus, for example, the event mentioned in the
previous paragraph as occurring on day 11,002,739 of era 89 occurred
also in UTU-8. A year later (remember, their years are 84 of ours)
they were living in UTU-7. So - to emphasize the point once more -
the fact is that right from the start of their history, way back in
UTU-14,286 (1.2 million Earth years ago), their psychic inner clocks
were telling them how many U-years lay ahead of them before the Last
Era. Imagine a shadowy dial moving slowly towards the
climax of a world's destiny; a remote but ever-present weight upon any
reflective mind.
Lastly we must mention the most rarely used, and the
simplest, Uranian dating system - the absolute day count. This is
simply a count of the days from the very beginning, taking no notice of
the division into eras. First Contact with Terrestrials according
to this count took place 350,470,238 days after the
first Uranian human being emerged from the pre-biotic
sivvan at
Dmara. The absolute count has its uses. It can be
convenient to refer to it when calculating time spans which
straddle several eras.