by Janet Morris
Day-Keepers’ Clock: A mythical gnomon upon whose face all that ever was, is, and will be is enscribed. Usually an oath, as “By the Day-Keepers’ Clock.”
Day-Keepers’ Roll: The records of the dead, the archives into which name and history are entered upon an individual’s death.
deep-reader: One whose skills allow access to the deeper conscious of another, exempting thoughts framed for communication. The value of deep-reading is considered by many to be greater than that of surface reading, for thoughts upon the surface, like the tip of an iceberg, give little and often faulty enlightenment as to what lurks beneath.
denter: A large-humped, nub-horned animal, passive and tractable, raised for meat and dairy, and often used as a draft beast. This single-hoofed animal ranges from ten to fourteen hands and may reach a weight of thirteen hundred B.S. pounds.
Detarsa: Fifth pass of the Silistran calendar.
dhara-san: (Stothric: homage to the day.) A system of mental and physical discipline said to align the sevenfold spirit with the human form. The physical and mental exercises are divided into eleven degrees, each of which has subdivisions, or embrasures, of sufficient diversity to allow the student to tailor his routine to his specific goals.
diet: The hide diet, which extends under Well Astria, has her entrance on the Hanks of the Litess River, within the walls of the Day-Keepers’ School; the hide name diet.
dippar: Silistran coinage. One gold dippar is equaled by fifty copper dippars. Dippars are minted only in independent cities, as opposed to titrium and gold half-wells and wells, minted by the Well system. They are round with octagonal holes punched in mid-disk, and are intaglioed with a representation of the city in which they were struck.
distrit: A bar-pressed, resinous stimulant rendered from danne and the gum of the fulchra tree, in itself a stimulant. The gum and danne powder are boiled until a thick yellow infusion the consistency of honey is produced. This is poured into oblong molds to set and cure. Although danne by itself may have soporific effects, when ingested in distrit form, its effects are nearly opposite—a raising of blood pressure with contraction of blood vessels and capillaries. Classified as a revivifier, distrit in excessive amounts may cause insomnia.
dorkat: Wingless cousin of the hulion, the dorkat has the same wedge-shaped head and pointed ears. The hind musculature tends to be lighter, but the fore-quarters are as heavily developed. Although the cranial capacity is identical with the hulion’s, dorkats do not demonstrate more than half the intelligence of their winged brethren. The nocturnal dorkat is prevalent in all the wilderness areas of Silistra, and its prey is thusly varied, dependent upon what the area will provide. They are exclusively carnivores, with protruding incisors. Dorkats, unlike hulions, have been known to turn man-eater, and are often troublesome raiders to herders of domesticated beasts.
draw: Draw time, one of the Weathers of Life, recognizable by the acceleration of the procession of events, and to the individual by an increased sensitivity and awareness of proximity to crux. Draw time, when properly exploited, is said to be the most fruitful of all the Weathers.
Dritira: Fifth-largest Silistran city, largest southern port. Dritira receives goods overland from Stra and Galesh, and ships from every city with merchant fleets. The Embrodming Inlet, which she shares with the city of the written word, Yardum-Or, is the most trafficked harbor upon Silistra. Dritira, as Yardum-Or, is a dependent city to Well Oppiri, third most prestigious of the Silistran Wells.
ebvrasea: The largest of Silistra’s omnivorous birds. Ebvraseas have been known to achieve a wingspread of sixteen feet or more. They are night hunters and seldom venture out of their craggy realms. Ebvraseas mate for life. They live isolated by the pair, and even mates do not hunt together. The average clutch of eggs is three, with seldom more than one reaching maturity. An adult ebvrasea will eat egg or young of another, even sometimes devouring their own offspring. Ebvraseas are most often black, brown, or white. The average lifespan of the mountain ebvrasea is forty Silistran years.
ervih: One twenty-eighth of the Silistran day; each enth contains seventy-five iths.
Falls of Santha: The great cascades at the source of the Litess River, high on the Plateau of Santha in the Sabembe range.
fax: An orangy elastic material common to M’ksakkans and other B.F. races. Fax does not burn; neither can it be torn or denuded of its message by any means known upon Silistra.
Feast of Conception: The oldest performed ceremony upon Silistra, dating back into prehistory. Before Haroun-Vhass, the Fall of Man, Silistrans observed Feast of Conception.
forereaders: Those females who have received training in the sorting of probability. Forereaders are the most powerful and prestigious women on Silistra, those whom the Day-Keepers have chosen to share then-work, those whose innate foreseeing ability is .88999 or better.
forereading: Stochastic processing, the sorting of probability.
gaesh: The hide gaesh, beneath the jungle city of Galesh on the Karir-Thoss River. The hide name gaesh.
Galesh: The city that feeds Silistra, Galesh lies in the most fertile Karir-Thoss Valley. The Galeshir swamps yield a number of medicinal herbs that cannot be found elsewhere, as well as the swamp kepher from whose scent glands come the base fixatives for the much-sought Galeshir perfumes. In this tropical climate the Silistran silkworm thrives; Galeshir carpets are second only to Parset rugs in their beauty and durability.
gol: The excrescence of the golachit of Silistra. Gol comes naturally in five colors: blue, amber, white, silver, and red. Black or other adulterated colors are produced by feeding the golachit the proper melanis (harmless chemically treated fungi). Gol is considered superior as a building material because of its permanence; gol might last a man a lifetime, while iron, brick, and wood seem to wear away visibly under the Silistran eye. Gol hardens upon exposure to air, the mean time being one-quarter ith. Gol may be seen in Silistran buildings as sheet gol, gol-blocks, or gol-forms, the natural mode of golachit building, and also in smaller molded shapes such as tables, pedestals, or even the serrated blade of the gol-knife.
golachit: The great builder beetle of Silistra thrives both in a wild state in the gollands at the feet of the Sabembes, and in a mutually beneficial symbiosis with man. As with web-weaver and webber, so do golachit and golmaster blend minds and create together such beauty as would have remained unrealizable dream for either alone. The golachit is a scavenger by nature and finds both food and · stimulation in this community with man. Golachits are fascinated by human children, and wild ones have often come into the human-golachit fraternity by following some hill-roaming child. Once in converse with a human mind, the golachit becomes fiercely protective of its humans and patrols the borders of their joint estate ceaselessly, marking off its territory with periodic excrescences. The golachit often travels in bands of up to a score, and many has been the man who has befriended one golachit and found, next morning, his good luck much multiplied. Golachits have been known to live a thousand years.
golmaster: One who enters into community of minds with a golachit; a golarchitect.
grinta: The most common flatfish on Silistra, recognized by its rusty brown dorsal scales and pale white ventral.
gristasha: The dark-skinned primitives who formed one-half of the hide aniet, precursors to the Parsets, who still tattoo themselves as did their fierce progenitors. The Parset culture, in language and custom, bears heavily this gristasha influence.
gul: The ovoid, juicy fruit from which kifra is obtained; any of the three varieties of gul, the yellow, the orange, the purple-blue.
half-dippar: Silistran coinage; half-dippars, whether gold or copper, have no holes.
half-well: (titrium.) Silistran coinage, Well-minted, of the pink metal titrium. Two titrium half-wells equal one gold half-well. The titrium half-well still bears the profile of M’glarren, first Liaison to Silistra and couch-mate of the Foundress Astria, the only Well coin of any denomination ever to be struck with a male
image. All other well coins bear the countenances of distinguished Well-Keepresses.
harih: (n.) A common and tasty bird whose feathers are black and iridescent. The harth thrives in city and town, as well as plain and forest. He is a migrating bird, preferring warm weather. In the northern regions at harvest past, the sky is indeed “harth-black” with their numbers, screeching their distinctive “Hareee, haree” cry.
harih: (adj.) Anything black and shining, especially black with blue or purple overtones.
Hertekiea: A planet in the Wingtip Cluster, the inhabitants of which have achieved homogeneity of race. The typical Hertekiean has darker skin than one might expect for a world in which the yellow, green, red, and violet races were absorbed by the blue race, but her proximity to the ever-flaring star Bnien is said to account for the increased melanin production of the last ten generations. The dark lords of Hertekiea, otherwise, are in size and build much like Silistrans, and ideologically compatible as well. The Hertekiean men and women display by hair length and intricate braiding patterns thereof those motives and bindings that are known on Silistra as chaldra.
hest: To bend or twist natural law to serve the will; to command by mind; to cause a probability not inherent in the time to manifest. (The line between nesting and shaping is somewhat difficult to define when highly skilled individuals are concerned. The rule of thumb is held to be thus: if natural law must be remade or totally superseded, as in creating a permanent object such as a fruit or a star, one is shaping. If one is simply controlling an already existing object or event, as would be the case if one caused a fruit or star already in existence to alter its behavior but not its structure, one is hesting. The fruit or star one moves to the right or the left or higher in the sky by will would not have behaved in that fashion, but is still the same star or fruit as was a natural inhabitant of the time before the hest was applied. If one, on the other hand, creates fruit or star, one has brought into the time, by a suspension of natural law, that which heretofore did not exist. One shapes matter. One hests time.) In usage, bringing in a hest, affecting probability.
hide: The seven hides of Silistra: aniet, bast, crill, diet, gaesh, rendi, and stoen. Each hide supported a thousand survivors and their progeny through the long years of waiting until the planet’s surface was again habitable. Under the aegis of the dharen’s Day-Keepers and forereaders, the hides were built and operating sixty years before the projected disaster. But few believed, and thus only in hide aniet were there other than Day-Keepers and forereaders when the world exploded into war. It is said that the word “hide” derived from the scoffing and mocking of pre-hide Silistra at the project. “Khys’s burrows” was another early name for the interconnected life-support complexes that saved what little of Silistra that was desirous of survival.
hide-days: The thousand years of subterranean living, accounted hide-year one through one thousand. Our present calendar date of 25,693 is counted from the first year spent above the ground. All that occurred before hide-year one is termed pre-hide, or prehistoric.
hide-name: Any of the seven hide-names: aniet, bast, crill, diet, gaesh, rendi, and stoen. Hide descent is always carried through the mother. The hide-name is second in the male, third in the female, and always takes lower-case honors.
high-couch: Formally, the Well-Keepress, also any woman able to demand over thirty gold dippars per couching-
hulion: The most intelligent animal on explored Silistra. The hulion—winged, furred carnivore of the Sabembe range—shuns civilization. They are known to have mind skills and a complex language, but are not symbolizers such as man. The hulion does as he wills upon Silistra, and none obstruct him. The high Sabembes and the unnamed western mountains are their domain of choice. There is no beast, including man, that can stand before a hulion’s onslaught— up to twenty-three hundred B.S. pounds of sinew and tooth and claw. Hulions have been seen with wingspreads four times the height of a man, beasts so large that their jaws could snap a man in half. Disregarding the wings, a hulion much resembles a large dorkat, even to the slit-pupiled eyes and the silk-tufted tail.
Iartex: One from the planet Iarte. The small stature and scuttling gait of these off-worlders is attributed to their planet’s half-again B.S. gravity. The Itabe colonized Iartex six thousand, three hundred years ago, and (other than the physical alternation their adopted homeland made upon them) seem to all intents and purposes culturally identical with their mother world, although each decries the other for its moral decay, and both sight unresolvable differences in their life-views.
Inner Well: The great central court within a Well’s walls.
Itabe: A .99998 planet which revolves around the star Eeia, closest neighbor to M’ksakka’s system; Dellin’s birthplace.
Itabic: One of Itabe, the race from which Dellin’s mother sprang. The Itabic peoples have made numerous contributions to society, the most notable being their Multilingual Cipher system, which lay bare the logics of language common to all cultures that has been of inestimable aid to Liaison missions and contact teams alike.
ith: One-seventy-fifth of an enth.
jeri: A costly and exotic M’ksakkan drink which mixes seven fruits with a char-filtered grain beverage; a sweet drink much favored by women.
jitkaw: Named for its cry, the jitkaw is a brightly crest-headed bird, usually tri-toned, with a curving beak and red eyes. The males have tails twice the length of the females, on which flames of light color scallop each feather’s tip. A red-yellow-amber jitkaw is held to be a harbinger of glad tidings, while a green-yellow-blue is the worst of signs.
Katrir: An off-world race characterized by tufted ears, split-pupiled eyes, and multiple birthings; from the planet Katrii, the gemstone center of the civilized worlds, and twin to the planet Beten.
kifra: A Silistran drink made from crushed guls, a live fruit wine.
Koster: Having origin upon the planet Kost, famous for her silks. The inhabitants of Kost, at least the ruling class, have a bluish, pale cast to their skin, and silvery hair, even in youth.
Liaison: The contact officers installed as semipermanent officials on Bipedal Federate Trade Union worlds. The designation “First,” “Second,” etc., is Silistran, but indicative of the local M’ksakkan hierarchy.
Liaisons Port: Foundress Astria’s couch-gift to the M’ksakkan M’glarren; Silistra’s single space port.
Litess: The Litess River.
Macara: The fourth pass of the Silistran calendar.
M’glarren: Couch-mate of Well Foundress Astria, first M’ksakkan to set foot upon Silistran soil.
Mi’ysten: True name for both the planet and people of the world the M’ksakkans call Zredori; experimental sphere of the Shapers.
M’ksakka: The administrative planet of the B.F. Group and Bipedal Federate Trade Union. M’ksakka is a highly industrialized world that exports all types of leisure and convenience machinery, a superior solar sail, and a synthetic shatterproof crystal.
M’ksakkan: Originating upon M’ksakka. All M’ksakkans, unless very high or very low in their society, bear the M’ before their name; as M’lennin, or, conversely, Khaf-Re Dellin.
Morrlta: The pelter town nestled in the foothills of the Sabembes.
name: A red, round fruit with crisp white pulp and a distinctly salty aftertaste; the tree, which bears red leaves and fruits eight passes out of the year; the drink made from pulping the fruit.
nera: 1.2 B.S. miles; Silistran measure of distance.
Oguast: A provisionally entered B.F. planet in Silistra’s own sector. Oguast’s surface is eighty-two percent water, her main exports are wistwa ivory and articles of superior ceramic process.
parr: The small, wiry-haired food beast of Silistra. Parr seldom reach more than six hands in height, but may carry up to four hundred B.S. pounds. The snub-nosed, flop-eared parr provides Silistra with meats, hide, fertilizer, and glue. It is said of a parr that only its hair does man no service.
parr-breeder: One who raises parr; one w
ho wears the low-chaldric brown strand.
parr-hide: The sturdiest leather available on Silistra, parr-hide is thicker and less pliable than either tas or denter. Its main uses are in harnesses, footwear, armor, and weapon-related leathers.
Parset: (adj.) Having origin in the Parset Lands.
Parset: (n.) An individual of any one of the five Parset tribes.
Parset Lands: The Parset Desert; the Parset barrens; the territories of the five tribes—Coseve, Dordassa, Itophe, Menetph (under which lies hide aniet), and Nemar. The Parset Lands lie at the bottom of Skirr Valley. They are bounded on the northeast by the tail of the Sabembes, on the east and south by the Embrodming Sea, and on the west by the southern Yaica range and the river Oppi.
pass: One-fourteenth of the Silistran year; the Silistran lunation. Each pass is composed of four sets.
peg: (v., to peg time.) To scale down one’s time sense, to become concerned with the moment, to expand the moment. Pegging time is a prerequisite to all temporal skills. More formally referred to as “taking stance in the now,” this process is the Silistran weapon against idleness and apathy, as well as the first step in sorting: discerning the probabilities available ” from the moment. The moment is infinitely fruitful; it is the mind’s apprehension of it that is subject to famine and drought. If a man, at the end of the day, recollects only a blur of similitude, it is then incumbent upon him to redouble his efforts to “take stance,” lest he come to the end of his life and find, in truth, that the days have all slipped away.
pelter: Trapper, one who hunts for fur beasts.
Pleiatu: The inhabitants of the planet Hiatus; master weavers
point-leader: Rank designation; officer over twenty in any private mercenary force, such as the Well guards.
Port Astrin: Well Astria’s dependent city. Port Astrin, adjoining the Liaison’s Port, caters more than any other Silistran city to off-worlders. “If a man itches for the stars, send him to Port Astrin. If Astrin does not sate, buy him passage, for where spirit goes, flesh must sometimes follow.”—Astrian proverb. In Port Astrin may be found all manner of off-world recreation and necessity. She is the only authorized embarkation/debarkation center, housing both M’ksakkan and Silistran Port Authorities.
