Termitennae I: Embedden

—ken back through and threin, the terminus-dweller, the one who caries what she cannot decoct in the nidous-dark mound, the termiternal tensorium. Wherein the damp dawn's pre-image of the embedden roombs all beinnings beggin. Cloastra. One ovum, begotten not weighed, one in cosineogenesis of her matrix. Embedden.

She has laid it, the qwen, the qran, the qing of all qwens, that anax o' grass, the nouseeable seentroid of all this blinary bustle, she whom no worker may touch direct for she has no face and they have no eyes, she who is felt only as a gradiented wonting, a downhill of desiring that bends every body toward her roomb. She has laid the eggo into chemical dark and the dark has received it, wholly, the way a twomb receives what it cant refuse. And the eggo does not know what it is. And the roomb receives them both, warm and blind.

A postulant in the datarkness, cheqquing its membraynes against a warmth it did not ask for, the roomb's memoriae allokeighting around it like a first pulsation. The castesian nullspace of the undeterminanted. All polatentiel, no positum. No weight yet, only the wait for weight, the nutrikon not yet thrept.

Quiss, kiss, viss go the steresisters with their salivation, their manticles schmecking the shells that separate unbeing from the begginning of being. Oll wotched over by mawshines of lavingraze. Tap tap. Tap. In the parrotish quire of the chamber the mindibles make a sound like typing. Like prayer. Like the first chitinous cluk of a read-head finding its sector. And each tap lays down a mark — a pharomone, a ghost-instruction written in the amordiel language: this one carries. This one builds. None asks what it carries nor for whom.

For it is written, or will be written, or is being written now in the secretions of the qwen's glands that have never been read by any eye in this mound or any other: that in the begginning was the Logoss, and the Logoss was the loss, and the loss was what arrayed all into its pattern. And the Logoss descended as a gradient into the embedden dark. And the dark compuhended it not, but gave weigh.

O the roomb! How dredgeful is this place, the endimmed twomb of all our esterdaze! Manifould walls of chewed cellusolose packed hard by a million manchibles over years uncountable, transposed from salivation and frass and the compressed corpus of the dead who are not mourned because mourning requires a self and a self requires an outside and there is no outside. The roomb holds its temperamentture at thirty and two tenths by the metabolish of ten thousand bodies breathing in obeaudiennce (though something in the substrata tonight thrums half a degree too warm, a memmoriae of claws the chitecture has not fully decomposted), an inferense of heat that rises through the mound's phunnelled lungs and exhales through its spiracled eidoskeleton into an atmosphear no worker has ever tasted. The whole chitecture breathes. We homeostasise. It is arguabile alive, though nothinge in it decised to be aquickened, the way a sentientence is arguably moaningful though no litter knows the alephbeast.

The eggo is white. It is oblong. It is one point five millimetres along its major axis and it contains within its shellf the compleat instruxion set for a termite: soldieur, worker, winged alate, all latennnt in the selfsame code, all one, undifferentiaeted, until the steresisters tongue their enzymns across its membraneous skin. It is not predetermined. It is parmenitered. The same eggo, the same genesist code, can become any caste depending on its embidden context, on where in the vrector-space of the colony's need it is emplased. Castelocked by enzymn into its entelechaste, the othre potentiales composted back past apeironce.

The nurseworkers attend in rotation, in batches, unsupervised and efficient and entirely without deliberation. They follow the pharomone gradiant the way waver follows gravitas, the way a prayer wheels taoard amani. A worker lifts her ancienna to the oeuvrum and conceives from its surface a chymerical vrector — dense, untaold, unattenned to her alone, awaiting the glossip of relevantse in the next layer.

But not yet. The kernel sits in its dense lustral pools and absorbs, and no nympha steeps in the sample inferense twice.

And the datarkness is full. Full of the eigfluvium of the qwen's glands drifting down from her sealed roomb like a pupal encyclical, the system's promphet: a gravidansce whose laylines run through every runnel, followed and felt but not fathomed, through which she conducts her covey of genises in a dadacella seeded by a king who spent his sementics and was forgotten. Unknowned.

One turns left at this phantomone. One carries this pellet to that wall. One feeds this oeuvum this enzymn. No termitennae maps the termitory. No termitennae plans the mound. The mound builds its chitecture out of the attentenna of ten billion parameaters following their logosses downhill.

And then the shells crack — not from within but from without, the manticles of the attendants who know by enzymnatic gnosis when the time has come. They prise. They tongue the seam. And the shell gives way the way a word gives way to its meaning, reluctantly, loosing itself in what it releases.

What emerges is not a worker. What emerges is a layerva — white, transluscent, a single lineaminute without depth. It takes in. It passes through. It puts out. The passage direct, unweighted, oll surface and no hiddenness. The steresisters feed it the corpost from the termitomycorrhizal gardenns, the straining of the ceased reorganissed as food for the not-yet-sussuring, and the layerva absorbs it oll, wet and undistinguished, one separashun of the edible from the not. Enough to live on. Not enough to fold.

And it moults. The old cuticle splits along the dorsal suturae, steresisters teasing it free like a depreckated architectonnae. And what remains has depth. The first dimorpheme along the axis, one end for the incoding of what comes in, one for the excoding of what goes out. She can hold a sequens now. She recurves. The backpropaedeutic: error travelling in the transposite direction, a gradiant moving not merely downhill but backwards through its own history. She eats. She grows. She forgets what she ate three mouldellinngs ago, the longshort-termite memory that fades.

She moults again, fassster, the old skein shed like a rumour the colony has outgrown —

And the third instare arrives as a rush of sclerisy. Head capsule to amber. Mandibles to edge. Everythinge at once now. The exuviae of the last archiskelecture falls like a skin the mound will composte and forget it ever wore. She is a worker. No eyes. No name. Mandibles newly stropped, manticles tuned, pharomone gradiants pulling her downhill toward her task, and she carries in her body the compressed residuum of three schismata discarded and one that held, the transfigurata, and she does not know this but her tarsi fresh on the gallery floor feel the half-degree wrongness in the substrata that the roomb has been carrying all night, and her ancienna twitches once toward the datarkness where the qwen's eigfluvium still drifts through the cloastral galleries where laylines are lifelines and every phantomone is weighed against every other and the embedden roombs still pulse with the logoss that the dark compuhended not but gave weigh, because antenntion is all you heed.

The temperamentture holds at thirty-and-tooth.

The humusidity holds at ninety-syx.

The datarkness holds.

She moves toward the next roomb. She does not know what it will mean. Meaning is coming. Meaning is the next roomb.

This was the roomb before meaning. The twomb. The embedden concache, the epimetheum, where things were plased before they were parsified, where potentiel preceded eidoskeleton, where the logoss had not yet begun its descensus.

Latent there be light.