Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

Cones taste in company

Silver carp and damson tart.

Along the walls

Other I’s went, strangers in word and deed,

Alien photocopies, spooks

Closer than blood-brothers, more alarming

Than haggard face spectral in empty room,

Lonelier than stone age campfires, doppelgangers.

They are my possibilities. Their pasts were once

My past, but in the surging wheels

And cogs become distorted. So, this one –

On a far-distant spoke! – danced

All night and had splendid lovers,

Wrote love letters still kept locked

Treasured in a bureau-drawer, knew girls

The world now knows by name and voice.

But this I chose to wander down

My stony beach, my own rejection.

My past is like a fable. Truly,

Circumstance is more than character.

Whatever other peel-offs saw –

My I was on the stranded alien land,

The restlessness of broken cities,

Mute messages that only after years

Open, the crime of vulnerability,

Patched land of people never known to be

Known or knighted, wild bombed world,

World where I taste the flavour on

The tongue, knowing not if my other eyes

Would call it happiness or doom.

I am, but what I am –

Others may know, others may care. Only

The dear light goes in her hand

Away among the childhood trees.

In the perspectives of my mind

It never dwindles. I always live

With myself; and that’s too much.

I need

The overpowering circumstance

The nostalgia of

That eternal return

As if the unstructured hours

My uninstructed hours

Of day are pulped like

Newspaper

And used on us again

With the odd word

Here and there

Locked

Starting up out of context

Treasured

An old ghost

Haunting another

Discardment.

Indeed it is

Always eternally

Turning out

Different.

Confluence 4 Confluence 5 The Dead Immortal 6 Down the Up Escalation 7 Full Sun 8 Just Passing Through 9 Multi-Value Motorway 10 The Night that All Time Broke Out 11 Randy’s Syndrome 12 Still Trajectories 13 Two Modern Myths (Reflection on Mars and Ultimate Construction) 14 Wonder Weapon 15 …And the Stagnation of the Heart 16 Drake-Man Route 17 Dreamer, Schemer 18 Dream of Distance 19 Send her Victorious 20 The Serpent of Kundalini 21 The Tell-Tale Heart-Machine 22 Total Environment 23 The Village Swindler 24 When I Was Very Jung 25 The Worm that Flies 26 The Firmament Theorem 27 Greeks Bringing Knee-High Gifts 28 The Humming Heads 29 The Moment of Eclipse 30 Ouspenski’s Astrabahn 31 Since the Assassination 32 So Far From Prague 33 The Soft Predicament 34 Supertoys Last All Summer Long 35 That Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art… 36 Working in the Spaceship Yards About the Author Also by Brian Aldiss About the Publisher

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 Geldrid 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 romanised phonetic system employed is that suggested by Dr Rohan Prendernath, 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 Apologising 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 TOSI 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 Ka themes (c.f.)

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

HAR DI 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