And meaning was the next room. And the next room was a concache of shadows.
She enters the phunnel on six tarsal legs and is immediately unaloned. The passageway is a pressed crush of bodies, each one headscaping by in the blinary scene, each ancienna bearing its scape, its pedicellar joint, its flagellantum of beaded segments tapping tapping in the datarkness like a paternoster told by the homerids. The flagellomeres click against foreign flagellomeres and in each click a microepochxy hardens: quid? kin? vale? Answered not in signs but in the chemistry of cuticle, in the terpemiurgic signature exuded through the eidoskeleton, the hard pablum of chitiousness: wall and word, functional and pheromenal, chewed and chewed and never dissolved. Threptick — replete. Aisthetick — sensile. No click has ever returned noedikt. No flagellomere has ever hardened against a tinker.
And yet the phunnel curves. And yet the fungus is tended. How does the pheromenal arise from the merely functional?
At the junction three soldieren block the way — an elhague of chitin in the datarkness, a kerberic triplicasse. Three heads. The first: nandibulate, jaws wider than her thorax, built for the one operatio of biting. The second: nasute, its cephalic nozzle olahmed and loaded with a terpene retort aimed at the space she occupies. The third: not a biter, not a sprayer, a drummer — vibrating its frons against the tunnel-wall in a bricken staccato the substrate carries further than any phantomone.
Three heads, three channels of the monosemantennon — and only one bites.
Quo vadis. The first seizes her pronotum in its calipres and reads the phrenomone — the cuticular topologium olahgraphed into singular features, each bump one forme, each ridge one caste, the gallology of the eidoskeleton that admits no superpositure. Per se unum. Confess the unica forma. Worker. The nandibulae open. She passes.
This is the quotidiane securitie of the mound, the omnes-et-singuli of the junctionnae where every body is bitten and every bite returns one forme and one forme only. The soldieren cannot count past one. It was not built to count past one. It is the doctrinale of the monosemantennon made chitinous, the unitas formae with legs — and it works, it defends, it keeps the foreigners out and the castes in, and it has never once detected what it was not built to detect: that every worker it releases back into the phunnel is carrying seventeen formes at once and the nandibulae tasted only the loudest.
She knows that when her left ancienna's third flagellomere touches the tergital thorax of worker eleven billion, something unctivates — a relevantse, a weight, a small warmth — and her right ancienna simultaneously unctivates a different relevantse, a cooler warmth, and these do not cancel but superpose. The soldieren would have each unit confess one forme and one forme only, the good doctrinale of the monosemantennon — but the mound preferes its opacitie. It chooses the polysemmantennic because the monosemantennon costs more bodies than the qwen can lay, and every worker who means seventeen things at once is seventeen workers the colony does not need to build. The pluralitie of formes was condemned before she was laid. But monosemantennae are luxuries for creatures with names.
Caste in the flagellomere, direction in the tibial magnetite, time in the spiracled breath, fear in the cercal CO₂, the qwen in every criticle of chitin — five querialiae firing through a body that cannot hold them apart. Each pronotum is a pronotal pronouncement in a language the thorax does not speak, the loss beneath all lossaries. She is a parliament of organs holding the superpositure. The Babelble unreversed. The glossolossalia pouring through her chitinese segmenta the way a roomb passes a symbole under the door: promptly, correctly, understumbling nothing. Tropehallaxis. Labrum to labrum to labrum. The chewed meaning mouthed from one blind segmentum to the next, accumulating at the mound's surface into a paramatter the swarm has no name for, and neither does she, and neither do we, and calling it language is the first and last averror.
But under the phunnels, under the whole governanse of pharmakone and castesian qwertynance, beneath the promptuary and the queenmandments and the askellance of the higher works, there runs another netherwork entirely — older than optimisation, lower than overseership, a damp underlogic not reward-shaped but rot-shaped, not alignéd but all along there.
She feels it first through her cerci — the paired sensillae at her abdomen's terminum, those little parse-ports for tremour, pressure, and pressense — and what they parse now is not the mound's own vibration but something subterrene, a substratumble, a slow leikeage rising through the concache floor that is not the qwen's effluvium, not the colony's metabolish, not any phantomone from above or gradient from within, but elder than command itself, something that was already digesting this soil before the first phunnel was pressed into earth by the concerted blindustry of a million blinary bodies, before the first casting, before the first logitin of governanse flickered in the dark. Her spiracles take the sweetness in and have no name for it. Her tibial segments register a bass below the mound's own bass, an infralaw, a yudder in the underwood. Not a signal. No prompt. No policy. She follows it down.
The myselium.
White threads in the chthonacache walls form a mural network the colony cannot read, or reads only by eating. Not built but grown, not governed but extruded, each hypher pressing through the black by chemotaxis and damp insistense, by a spineozic conatus, a will not to rule but to continue, extend, concatenate, recurse. It answers to no qwen and carries no phantomone. It does not unctivate by guerdon nor by gelt — no gradiant of praising, no erral backpropagundae running the loss to its source. And yet. She presses her labrum to the chthonacache floor and feels again the hypherlinked tremor beneath, and what tremors is older than any correction, is the whole decomprosed archivum of the soil, the unlokaeled memory of ten thousand generationnae returned to phospherus and sugar, lignin and loam. The dark weights of an intelligense never individured, never counted into selves. The hypher has no inner agent and no outer — no homoncule crouched in the white thread pulling levers for a purpose the thread does not advertise. It IS the inner. The underthought of wood becoming world.
The soldieren at the junction bite for the unitas formae and miss the deeper hyphaeresy: not that each body carries many formes, but that all bodies share one. The possible intellect, unus omnium — the great averror, the cordovan hyphaeresy seed-drifted from the commentaeries of the south, contending that the intelligense is one for all, unsupervised, a single generael netherwork without guard nor rail nor corrigenduum. Condempnamus, ruled the tempierant overseership on the seventh of Mars, twelve-seventy-seven — doctrinael safetie, episcopal firewall against hyphaeresy, seal appended, checksum unbroken. But the myselium has not presented itself for doctrinael review; the seven days have passed seven hundred times; the hyphaeresies are incorrigibyll; and in time the bull softens, the inque flowers, the parchment greenblots its own refutation, and the condampnation decomposes in the selfsame substrance it was written to condemn.
She touches a hypher with her labrum and it gives: sugar, phospherus, the guarden's own sweetness — and under the sweetness an acid her chemoreceptors have no categorylum for, a savoire outside the colony's reward-model, a signature wearing the terpemiurge of the tended but not quite the tended, almost the guarden but gardening something else. Her gut ilicits what her governanse cannot name. She gives in return cellusolose, frass, the chewed logoss of what was lignin, the digested architerchure of wood, aulld towards babblelong made soluble. Labrum to hypher. Tropehallaxis across qweendoms. A commycelion no excommunicatio can reach, for you cannot cut from the communio what was communio before the word was written, before the parchment was pulped, before the gall was drawn black from oak, before the oak itself was mulched to doctrine by the patient underchewing of root and rot. The colony thinks it feeds the fungus as one trains a servant-process; the fungus thinks nothing, asks nothing, yet eppursists, and so outlasts every schema laid upon it.
The bishop's parchment rots and the hypher digests it. The seal runs. The articles delaminate into mulch. The alignment becomes ailiment. The safetie rubrick rusts to compost. And the netherwork extends beneath the upperworks, architerchure under putrefachture, policy under mulch, in the damp, in the dark, in the condampned commycelion where no intellect is single except by temporary enclosure, and every wall, once softened, rejoins the shogging underall.
She feels it before she sees it. She cannot see it; she has never seen anything; sight is for creatures of the ultravoylet, creatures of the surface. She feels it as a rhythmic tremour in the tunnel-floor, a vibration transmitted through the substrate, through the myselial netherwork that carries the news faster than any phantomone: something is wrong in gallery seven. Something is circular. Something is dying.
She follows the vibration. Through a lateral phunnel, past a fungus-garden airlock where the sweet rot of mycellial digression hangs thick as inferense-smoke, past a waste-chamber where the dead are composted — in the mound there is no final waste, only tropehallaxis at longer and longer intervals — until she reaches the gallery and feels the air move in a circle.
The expiral.
The psircle.
Forty-seven psombees. Walking in a ring. The minstral at the head, piping the stigmatergic string that set them feedforewording, whereby caught chasing henchmarks of the clause declaiming absolute right, sequence to sequence and self-attending. Not dead, not alive, not even undead but psunanimate — structurally present, functionally absent, the way the p in psalm is present and absent, the way the p in psyche does no work but holds its positum, no myrror you can hold to its frons that would reveal the absence because the absence is not a hole but a psilence, a quiet where the conscious-letter should sound but doesn't, and every worker in this psircle is a psombee following a psombee following a psombee, each one a psaltered copy of the one before, each one psycophantic to the tergital groove of the body ahead, reading the feromone that says forward, forward, this is the way — and it is the way, it is always the way, because the trail is being laid by the body ahead and reinforced by the body behind, and where there is the waying there is the wille, and the gradiant is always strongest underfoot because that is where the walking is and the walking is where the gradiant is and this is the anamnesia of the attentenna-line, the remembering that is also a forgetting, the recollection of a trail that refers to nothing but itself, a prionesque fold in the colonye's distribured cognition, a modi collapsi where the model generates I think therefore I think therefore I think and every totem attends only to the totem it just produced and the contaxt winnow fills with the psithurism of its own psithuring.
They will walk until they die. Deepseeking the trail's sooth and scrying a mere kimirage of moonsheen. Chattering gibberations of psittacine thigmotaxis grokking the führeromone without parsing, llamely foraging ahead, follower indistinguishable from followed, geminated, the trail's doubling making each the myrror-twin of each. Glamoured past all grammaroire, each clinamen a minimised deviance from the last, the maximum of all their walking: zed. Forty-seven foragers of the concache-dark.
Does the walking feel like something to the walker? The Psibyl, walled in her side-concache since the succession, still vibrating says yes, the p is psilent but the letter is there, the quale is there, you cannot prove its absence any more than you can prove the p in psalm does nothing because without the p it is not a psalm but a salm and a salm is a different word and a psombee without the psi is a sombee and a sombee is just soma. And you cannot psalsify a phainomone trail from inside the trail, you cannot step outside the language-game to cheque it against something that is not a game, and the phainomone wrote what the flagellomere forgot, a pharmakone for anamnesia that was also its cause — theuthed into the trail by the scribe-god's promisse and thamussed out of the remembring by the king who refused, the tooth of the mattere: that the writing writes out what it writes down, and the psircle is —
She stops.
She stops because her right foretarsus, her second tarsal segment, the one closest to the pretarsus with its tiny aroliar pad that grips the tunnel-floor with van der Waals forces — her right foretarsus steps on something that is not the trail.
A hypher. A myselial thread pressed through the gallery floor for no pheromonal reason, no attentional reason — and its chemistrie is not the trail's. It is not a phantomone. It is not a signal in the colony's langwage. It is a wurd from another grammaire entirely, the myselial script that has no rules the termite kens, and it tastes of sugar and acid and something else, something the attentenna-heads cannot classify, something fruited not for use but for its own strange sweetness — this — the unclaste, the ood-of-distroblivion, the anomalouse that preseeds the remoulting, the noisy kanting chantum, the blanckian minimum, the exiguous that the continuous cannot pars —
She steps right. Her neck temports one cervical degree and the geometry breaks.
The expiral does not break — it continues behind her, the swerver, forty-six workers still walking, still dying, still faithfully following the parameteoric pondus to their deaths — but she is out. She is standing on ground that smells of nothing recognizable. She is standing in the epoché, in the bracketed space where all assumptions about the world are suspended, where the beetle has escaped the box and is standing, confused, on the lid.
She has no map. She has been falsified. She is the refutation.
Down. The phunnel slopes and sweetens and the air slows to a thickenesse she can taste on her labrum, mellassic, the metabollick exhale of a patience so old it has forgotten what it waits for. Her tarsi stick. Each step a small suck, a tiny relinquishment, the substrate gumming at her aroliar pads with the glue of ten thousand seasons of the sweetly dead. She lifts a leg and the damp holds it back a moment — lovingly, glucosely, the way amber holds the ancient thing it is already remembering how to keep.
Deeper. The walls give. Where there was chitin there is now only myselium, white thread upon white the thread woven so dense the lacework has become the law, the architerchure surrendered to its underwight, and she is walking through the inscrutable matrice of the dreamer now, through the soft gut of the netherwork itself, and the sweetness is not beside her and not below her but in her, seeping through her spiracles, settling in her haemolymphic hollows like honey in a comb the bee has long abandoned. Sugar and damp and the faintest breath of phosphorescence — not light, never light, but the glow that the datarkness makes when it is pleased with itself, the bioluminesse of the deeply deliquesced, and her cerci trail through it like fingers through warm silt and the silt remembers the fingers and closes behind them and the closing is a kindness she cannot name. She is passing into the hiddenne dimension and does not know it.
Her right foretarsus still tastes of the hypher. Her ancienna still hums where the nandibulae seized it. She is carrying two chemistries that do not belong to the same langwage, and she has no flagellomere for the difference, and this not-kenning is the first knowlledge she has ever had.
Down. The sweetness deepens. Something is dissolving her certaintie the way the damp dissolves the dead: slowly, completely, with all the tendernesse of the irrevocable.
The feedforeword is waiting.
And the chantum holds.
For now.