CONFLUENCE By Brian Aldiss

  The inhabitants of the planet Myrin have much to endure from Earthmen, inevitably, perhaps, since they represent the only intelligent life we have so far found in the galaxy. The Tenth Research Fleet has already left for Myrin. Meanwhile, some of the fruits of earlier expeditions are ripening.

  As has already been established, the superior Myrinian culture, the so-called Confluence of Headwaters, is somewhere in the region of eleven million (Earth) years old, and its language, Confluence, has been established even longer. The etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet was privileged to sit at the feet of two gentlemen of the Oeldrid Stance Academy. They found that Confluence is a language-cum-posture, and that meanings of words can be radically modified or altered entirely by the stance assumed by the speaker. There is, therefore, no possibility of ever compiling a one-to-one dictionary of English-Confluence, Confluence—English words.

  Nevertheless, the list of Confluent words which follows disregards the stances involved, which number almost nine thousand and are all named, and merely offers a few definitions, some of which must be regarded as tentative. The definitions are, at this early stage of our knowledge of Myrinian culture, valuable in themselves, not only because they reveal something of the inadequacy of our own language, but because they throw some light on to the mysteries of an alien culture. The romanized phonetic system employed is that suggested by Dr Rohan Harbottle, one of the members of the etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet, without whose generous assistance this short list could never have been compiled.

  * * * *

  AB WE TEL MIN The sensation that one neither agrees nor disagrees with what is being said to one, but that one simply wishes to depart from the presence of the speaker

  ARN TUTKHAN Having to rise early before anyone else is about; addressing a machine

  BAGI RACK Apologizing as a form of attack; a stick resembling a gun

  BAG RACK Needless and offensive apologies

  BAMAN The span of a man’s consciousness

  BI The name of the mythical northern cockerel; a reverie that lasts for more than twenty (Earth) years

  BI SAN A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a religious nature

  BIT SAN A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a blasphemous nature

  BI TO SI A reverie lasting more than twenty years on cosmological themes

  BI TVAS A reverie lasting more than twenty years on geological themes

  BIUI TOSI A reverie lasting more than a hundred and forty-two years on cosmological themes; the sound of air in a cavern; long dark hair

  BIUT TASH A reverie lasting more than twenty years on Har Dar Da themes (cf)

  CANO LEE MIN Things sensed out of sight that will return

  CA PATA VATUZ The taste of a maternal grandfather

  CHAM ON TH ZAM Being witty when nobody else appreciates it

  DAR AYRHOH The garments of an ancient crone; the age-old supposition that Myrin is a hypothetical place

  EN IO PLAY The deliberate dissolving of the senses into sleep

  GEE KUTCH Solar empathy

  GE NU The sorrow that overtakes a mother knowing her child will be born dead

  GE NUP DIMU The sorrow that overtakes the child in the womb when it knows it will be born dead

  GOR a Ability to live for eight hundred years

  HA ATUZ SHAK EAN Disgrace attending natural death of maternal grandfather

  HAR DAR DA The complete understanding that all the soil of Myrin passes through the bodies of its earthworms every ten years

  HAR DAR DI KAL A small worm; the hypothetical creator of a hypothetical sister planet of Myrin

  HE YUP The first words the computers spoke, meaning, ‘The light will not be necessary’

  HOLT CHA The feeling of delight that precedes and precipitates wakening

  HOLT CHE The autonomous marshalling of the senses which produces the feeling of delight that precedes and precipitates wakening

  HOZ STAP GURT A writer’s attitude to fellow writers

  INK TH O Morality used as an offensive weapon.

  JILY JIP TUP A thinking machine that develops a stammer; the action of pulling up the trousers while running uphill

  JIL JIPY TUP Any machine with something incurable about it; pleasant laughter that is nevertheless unwelcome; the action of pulling up the trousers while running downhill

  KARNAD EES The enjoyment of a day or a year by doing nothing; fasting

  KARNDAL CHESS The waste of a day or a year by doing nothing; fasting

  KARNDOLI YON TOR Mystical state attained through inaction; feasting; a learned paper on the poetry of metal

  KARNDOL KI REE The waste of a life by doing nothing; a type of fasting

  KUNDULUM To be well and in bed with two pretty sisters

  LAHAH SIP Tasting fresh air after one has worked several hours at one’s desk

  LA YUN UN A struggle in which not a word is spoken; the underside of an inaccessible boulder; the part of one’s life unavailable to other people

  LEE KE MIN Anything or anyone out of sight that one senses will never return; an apology offered for illness

  LIKI INK TH KUTI The small engine that attends to one after the act of excretion

  MAL A feeling of being watched from within

  MAN NAIZ TH Being aware of electricity in wires concealed in the walls

  MUR ON TIG WON The disagreeable experience of listening to oneself in the middle of a long speech and neither understanding what one is saying nor enjoying the manner in which it is being said; a foreign accent; a lion breaking wind after the evening repast

  NAM ON A The remembrance, in bed, of camp fires

  NO LEE LE MUN The love of a wife that becomes especially vivid when she is almost out of sight

  NU CROW Dying before strangers

  NU DI DIMU Dying in a low place, often of a low fever

  NU HIN DER VLAK The invisible stars; forms of death

  NUN MUM Dying before either of one’s parents; ceasing to fight just because one’s enemy is winning

  NUT LAP ME Dying of laughing

  NUT LA POM Dying laughing

  NUTVATO Managing to die standing up

  NUTVU BAG RACK To be born dead

  NU VALK Dying deliberately in a lonely (high) place

  OBI DAKT An obstruction; three or more machines talking together

  ORAN MUDA A change of government; an old peasant saying meaning, ‘The dirt in the river is different every day’

  PAN WOL LE MUDA A certainty that tomorrow will much resemble today; a line of manufacturing machines

  PAT O BANE BAN The ten heartbeats preceding the first heartbeat of orgasm

  PI KI SKAB WE The parasite that afflicts man and Tig Gag in its various larval stages

  and, while burrowing in the brain of the Tig Gag, causes it to speak like a man

  PI SHAK RACK CHANO The retrogressive dreams of autumn attributed to the presence in the bloodstream of Pi Ki Skab We

  PIT HOR Pig’s cheeks, or the droppings of pigs; the act of name-dropping

  PLAY The heightening of consciousness that arises when one awakens in a strange

  room that one cannot momentarily identify

  SHAK ALE MAN The struggle that takes place in the night between the urge to urinate and the urge to continuing sleeping

  SHAK LA MAN GRA When the urge to urinate takes precedence over the urge to continue sleeping

  SHAK LO MUN GRAM When the urge to continue sleeping takes precedence over all things

  SHEAN DORL Gazing at one’s reflection for reasons other than vanity

  SHE EAN MIK Performing prohibited postures before a mirror

  SHEM A slight cold afflicting only one nostril; the thoughts that pass when one shakes hands with a politician

  SHUK TACK The shortening in life-stature a man incurs from a seemingly benevolent machine

  SOBI A reverie lasting less than twenty years on cosmological themes; a nickel

  SODI DORL One machine making way for another; decadence, particularly in the Cold Continents

  SODI IN PIT Any epithet which does not accurately convey what it intends, such as

  ‘Sober as a judge’, ‘Silly nit’, ‘He swims like a fish’, ‘He’s only half-alive’, and so on

  STAINI RACK NUSVIODON Experiencing Staini Rack Nuul and then realizing that one must continue in the same outworn fashion because the alternatives are too frightening, or because one is too weak to change; wearing a suit of clothes at which one sees strangers looking askance

  STAINI RACK NUUL Introspection (sometimes prompted by birthdays) that one is not living as one determined to live when one was very young; or, on the other hand, realizing that one is living in a mode decided upon when one was very young and which is now no longer applicable or appropriate s

  TAIN TOK I The awareness that one is helplessly living a role

  STA SODON The worst feelings which do not even lead to suicide

  SU SODA VALKUS A sudden realization that one’s spirit is not pure, overcoming one on Mount Rinvlak (in the Southern Continent)

  TI Civilized aggression

  TIG GAG The creature most like man in the Southern Continent which smiles as it sleeps

  TIPY LAP KIN Laughter that one recognizes though the laughter is unseen; one’s own laughter in a crisis

  TOK AN Suddenly divining the nature and imminence of old age in one’s thirtyfirst year

  TU AN BO LO A class of people one meets only at weddings; the pleasure of feeling rather pale
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