Glossary for DESCENDING ROAD

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L4: given two astronomical masses such as the earth and its moon, there are two points in space near the moon’s orbit that form equilateral triangles with the earth and the moon. One point, called L4, lies in the moon’s orbit ahead of the moon, the other, called L5, is behind the moon in its orbit. These are called Lagrange points after their discoverer, Jean Louis Lagrange. Each of these two points is at the bottom of a gravitational well, so that matter drifting into that well tends to remain there. There are well-known L4 and L5 points for Jupiter, called the Trojan points, Trojan One and Trojan Two, lying respectively behind and ahead of Jupiter in its orbit. L4 and L5 points make good homes for space stations, mines, and refineries.

Labeyrie hypertelescope: an extension of the VLBI (Very-Long-Basline Interferometry) telescopes of the twentieth century CE. The SVS made successful use of this system in its search.

laceworked: laceworking is an art form requiring the highly-detailed forming of very tough metals. The door inside Engrammatic Inn was made of steel of surgical stainless quality, and carried a historical sequence of reliefs showing the Courtship of Praezenti. These historical narrative-frame sequences were called jadronarri. The filigree on the door was as fine as human hair, in areas protected from the bumps and buffets of everyday life in an inn; other raised areas, showing closeups of people intertwined in love and battle, served as the filigreed areas’ protection.

Lady: Lady, The Lady: a woman who has merged with an alien in a manner far more intimate than the aliens would usually employ. Instead of simply sharing a body and brain, she allowed her alien partner to share her consciousness, and in return the alien granted her considerable power to alter her own form and capacities. See also Allashani.

lander: lander, landers: a spacecraft constructed at the starship arrival point for ferrying passengers and supplies down from the starship orbit to the surface of the destination planet. To save mass, landers are put together out of functional starship pieces. The passengers and crew of the starship, along with robos and repair droids, provide the necessary labor. Assembly of landers is done in zero-G in vacuum, requiring the use of pods to protect the workers.

lanthanide: lanthanide, lanthanides: any of the rare-earth elements with atomic number 57-71, all with similar electron valence characteristics due to inner-shell depletion. Lighter-weight chemical analogues to the actinides. Promethium, an element not normally found in nature due to its nuclear instability, was discovered in one isotopic form in a deposit of lanthanide ores not far from Andrew‘s farm. The quantities were very small, but the half-life of the isotope appeared to be on the order of a half-million years, absolutely out of range for the isotope’s expected nuclear stability. This discovery triggered a feverish search for more of the promethium, and speculation on the stabilizing factors for its atomic nucleus. The search was redoubled when trace amounts of curium turned up in a uranium mine, with a pattern of radioactivity similar to that of the promethium.

Laogai: an old name for the Sinese prison labor system, furnishing workers to firms such as EmpCo for the starship construction program.

laparotool: laparotool, laparotools: surgical instruments used to probe and resolve medical problems deep within the human body.

lapscript: lapscript, lapscripts: a highly-stylized form of writing used by Astran Terxil Coll both for ornament and for covert messaging. The individual letters/symbols overlapped and tangled, as in the Celtic knotwork of ancient Earth; some say the style confers power on the words.

Lascaris: n., name identifying a line of Byzantine emperors of Ancient Earth, of whom Theodore I Lascaris founded Nicaea.

Lathromill: a shopkeeper and friend of Nexi Harren. Her shop had been near the Aswar Tyrae crossing, in Sobi Zone in the City.

lavroom: lavroom, lavrooms: a combination toilet and spray shower space.

Layo Lamba: the large moon of Opo Bira Lima.

leafspanners: leafspanner, leafspanners: construct-creatures of innerspace, used to guide a seeker to some destination. The intelligences of the Archives use them sometimes.

Leil: member of Astran Terxil Coll, wife of Andrew.

Lejina: daughter of Quessnar Viustin, a miner retired and living in the City.

letterscript: letterscript, letterscripts: the many forms of writing, including ideoscript, knifescript, lapscript and letterscript, are well-distinguished. Letterscript originates with Sinantro Coll; its blocky forms rope together with swoops of thinner written cabling which coalesce words and phrases.

LF: low frequency, referring to radio sensors used in battle helms.

Li Dezzart: Dezzart, Li Dezzart: an independent andro-farm operator.

Li Xiao: Li Xiao, Sinese SVS group

Librarian: a representation of a man, usually in ancient garb and accoutrements, appearing to fugitives in the Archive‘s Library.

lift: lift, lifts: the cities have lifts, or elevators, electromagnetically powered, and equipped with mini-brains. Modern inhabitants of the City take the sinking of a new lift shaft as a common occurrence. The lifts run from the top of the City to its lowest well-inhabited levels, at the deepest around Level 680. Some few, such as the lift used by Andrew and his companions when returning to the City, go deeper. The City‘s depth, with its gradient of air pressure, necessitates pauses in travel to allow passengers to adapt to the pressure changes occurring with rising or falling underground altitude.

liftcar: liftcar, liftcars: the car in which passengers and freight ride the lifts in the cities.

liftway: liftway, liftways: the lifts and their approaches and exits.

liftwell: liftwell, liftwells: the shaft of a lift.

lightline: lightline, lightlines: a bundle of lightwires.

lightpanel: lightpanel, lightpanels: power-converting panels used on the surface to capture solar energy.

lightpipe: lightpipe, lightpipes: the ‘storm-drain’ version of a lightwire, capable of carrying millions of concurrent optical broadband signals. See also infoconduit.

lightvine: lightvine, lightvines: a plant containing as part of its stem structure some fibers capable of piping light from one end to the other. Often used for decoration. Related to the longrunner or tarona plant of the western plains.

lightwire: fiberwires, lightwire, lightwires: the equivalent of a fiberoptic cable, often used to interconnect panels of circuitry.

lignin: lignin, lignins: these organics are favorites of many andros for flavoring food and drinks. The taste range is not within human acceptability; andros say the lignins rake the consciousness like summer lightning on hot soil. Humans think the lignins are awful.

limbus nimbus: a street-slang reference to the parts of one’s nervous system, hormones, and glands stimulated by sexual attraction.

Linami: sister of Leil.

Linas: a militiaman from the City, on tour in the upland farming region.

Linderus: a Gellin Sintherou Coll rebel fighter.

Lindocorp: one of the largest corps, and one of the few not run from the City.

lirliga: an andro name for a color in the five-octave andro color spectrum. lirliga is in the far infrared range (3000-1500 nm), and its name refers to a multiple of the human color blue-green. In relation to neighboring colors in a musical scale with red at A, this would be E. From tabular data: lirliga is the name of a color in the spectrum visible to andros. lirliga is in the Far Infrared (3000-1500 nm). In the five ‘octaves’ of the andro color spectrum, lirliga equates to a musical E, and is in the same place in the octave as Blue-Green. More information is available in the reference table titled ANDRO COLOR NAMES. From tabular data for “lirliga": lirliga is the name of a color in the spectrum visible to andros. lirliga is in the Far Infrared (3000-1500 nm). In the five ‘octaves’ of the andro color spectrum, lirliga equates to a musical E, and is in the same place in the octave as Blue-Green. More information is available in the reference table titled ANDRO COLOR NAMES.

Little Ocean: the sea to the west of the Upper Continent where the City and most of the cities lie. West of the Little Ocean lies the waste of Harvath, also called the Desolation.

livepaper: a form of electronic paper, a cheap, flexible, durable, lightweight medium of the thickness of paper but capable of displaying grayscale text and images stored within it. The stored information is received from a variety of wireless networks. The user of the livepaper supplies selection and command input through pressure-sensitive regions of the sheets.

lizardskin: lizardskin, lizardskins: one of the style-fads, or sesses of the City, for a few years before the time of the story; people could replace normal skin with sections of tough, scaled reptilian skin in a variety of colors and textures. It became practical for some kinds of City work when some street-fighters found a variant which could turn a knife-blade, or tolerate skidding contact with rough stone.

Loc-Ceru: a popular drink in the lower regions of the City.

lockdoor: lockdoor, lockdoors, molecular lockdoor, molecular lockdoors: the molecular lockdoor is an expensive isolation portal, operating at the molecular level. Its edges are complementary tangled strains of tough, flexible long-chain polymers which latch together when an electrical field is removed, making a seal impermeable to all normal forms of matter. Impurities and dust on the joining surfaces of the lockdoor are engulfed and removed by a slow phagocytic process carried out by specialized components of the polymer. The engulfed material emerges after a while on the lower-pressure side of the lockdoor.

locked and rocked: lock and rock, locked and rocked, locking and rocking: enjoying sexual intercourse while bound closely together, as with elastic rope, an oversize slipsuit, or a live sex harness.

lockway: the entryway to an airlock on a space station or spacecraft.

longbone: describing an unusually tall, lean person.

longnut: longnut, longnuts: one of the ingredients of puri. Longnuts are salty-sour seeds, the size of a thumb-tip, from a tree that grows along the few lowland rivers of the Upper Continent. They are high in fat and complex carbohydrates.

longrunner: longrunner, longrunners: a creeping vine that grows underneath the tall grasses of the western plains. Its fruit is delicious, salty-sweet, and its stems and shoots carry light-conducting fibers, for which no one knows any useful application. Called ‘tarona' by the people of the country colls. See also lightvine

Lorn: corpo in country with Ereet.

Lower Continent: also called Sirathen. On its northern edge, joins the Upper Continent at a great scarp, called the Great South Fall, or Sang Kail in Sinantro, that runs for three thousand kilometers between the Little Ocean on the west and the Great Eastern Sea on the east. The scarp drops into a rugged range of mountains that softens into hills as one travels southward into a tangle of swamps, rivers and jungly forests.

Luce: Andrew‘s and Engel‘s family name. This is a common name among the families of Darko Hejj Coll.

Ludko: Ludko, Ludko Drevic: Ludko Drevic, cryosleep worker and Science Abolition Movement saboteur.

Lulith: Lulith, Moon: the larger and nearer of the world’s two moons.

Lulith Calendar: Lulith Calendar, Moon Calendar: also called the Moon Calendar. The Moon calendar is the primary ceremonial calendar for the colls, except for the agricultural schedules, which follow the City Calendar. Fourteen months per Moon year, over a sixteen-Moon-year cycle, yield only about a 0.053-day error, which is adjusted as required by the periodic great convocation of the colls about every nineteen Moon calendar cycles, or 304 Moon-years. The calendar is kept synchronized fairly well with the Moon phases by alternating long and short months per year, and long and short years per cycle.; The colls hold their general convocation every sixteen years.; Corsang Run, the Festival of the Mothers, is an annual event that takes place through the first several days of the ninth Moon month.; When the City new year coincides with the Moon new year, about every 43 City years, the Festival of the Mothers is begun at the exact moment when the Moon is in inferior conjunction with the Sun (as at the time of solar eclipse), and lasts several days longer than ordinarily.; The Moon Calendar months and names (in Clang) are as follows: 1 – Ajitan; 2 – Atandai; 3 – Shutan; 4 – Duretan; 5 – Etantaz; 6 – Tanij; 7 – Ustana; 8 – Metana; 9 – Tanzor; 10 – Tazinan; 11 – Joutan; 12 – Tanekh; 13 – Otanou; 14 – Vzitain.

luminal: light-bearing.

Lungotevere: one of the major streets in Rome following a path adjoining the Tiber (Tevere) River.

lurker: lurker, lurkers: an andro name for an alien inhabiting a human or andro host.

Lusin: brother of Mentrius, and cousin to Leil.

lutija: an andro name for a color in the five-octave andro color spectrum. lutija is in the far infrared range (3000-1500 nm), and its name refers to a multiple of the human color green. In relation to neighboring colors in a musical scale with red at A, this would be D sharp or E flat. From tabular data: lutija is the name of a color in the spectrum visible to andros. lutija is in the Far Infrared (3000-1500 nm). In the five ‘octaves’ of the andro color spectrum, lutija equates to a musical D#, and is in the same place in the octave as Green. More information is available in the reference table titled ANDRO COLOR NAMES. From tabular data for “lutija": lutija is the name of a color in the spectrum visible to andros. lutija is in the Far Infrared (3000-1500 nm). In the five ‘octaves’ of the andro color spectrum, lutija equates to a musical D#, and is in the same place in the octave as Green. More information is available in the reference table titled ANDRO COLOR NAMES.

lycopod: lycopod, lycopods: woody plants, large, hard-stemmed relatives of the club mosses.

lysostatil: a ‘cell repair moderator’, which stabilizes the human cytochemical repair processes, preventing both unwanted cell death and unwanted exuberant growth.