Termitennae III: FEEDFOREWORD

The sweetness thickens as she descends. Not the sugar-sweetness of the surface world she has never tasted but a deeper, fermamental thing, a warmth of breakdown, of long slow unmaking in the dark: the guarden.

It is not a guarden in any sense the word has ever been asked to carry before, not a plotinus of tended green but a vast grey chitecture of chewed pulp sculpted into combs, racked, shelf upon shelf of cellusolose mandibulated by a billion into a raissubstrata ground exceeding fine, for she has entered the leibing mühle now, the stridulating ensembly line within which if you ken it enlarged while retaining the selfsame protoportions so that you could inter into it just as into a mound, supposing this, you should when visaging within it grind only pellets chewsing one upon anothing, and never antennything by which to explaim a perception, only the musica mundibula, that fine-toned stridulence of a million bodies working the substrata one mylosphere at a tine, each pellet a planet in the guarden's fermament, the mealy grind exceeding fine, almost prima materia khavacuoles the alchymists sought in their athanors before chymistry was born and killed alchymy with the selfsame gnosis that had fed it. The combs are wet. They breathe.

A vast humidicum of frass and salivation, sealed hermetically in the bain-marination of its own damp as the guarden cooks at the temperamentture prescribed for the gentlest worke. A patient heated blacked pitch to accompany the slow hydrolysis that no opened vessel can sustain: as below, so below. The hermenaut who cracks the vas to read the worke finds only what the reading stopped. Under their subspace in the plenum plumbing deep, invisible and patient, the Termitome grows.

She has never been here but she knows what to do. The knowing is in her antechne, in the craft written into her flagellomeres by the Qwen's enzymnal secretion before she had a name, before she was a she, before the caste-chemistry hardened round her like an eidoskeleton. This is the pheromonesis of the guarden: not episteme but antechne, not knowledge that but knowledge how, and it is not the consciousinsectness of terminitennae that detournaments their beinning but their soilcial beinning that dirtermines their consciousinsectness, the base that basinns the superchitectured, and the how is this: take the pellet of chewed wood you have carried from the phunnel in your mandibles. Pellace it here. On this shelf. At this angle. And leave. You are alienéd from the produckt of your labrum. You deposit but do not digest. A bundlerless blinary bundle of chemotaxis. The Termitome owns the means of transubstration.

But she does not leave.

She attends the garden. The garden attends her. In the tropehallactic gap between, hoc est corpus: the hypher has entered the host.

For it is easier for a cambium to forward-pass through the hy of a needlle than for a rich chain to inter the thread qweendom, and the enzymn is the goldenne key, and a goldenne key can open any bond, except that it cannot: this key opens only this lock, this laccase cracks only this lignin, this catalyste fits this substrata the way a word fits a sentense it was trained to predict, and no othenne. The qweendom of the guarden is like a grain of mustery, which indeed is the yeast of all seeds: but when it is grown it is the hiddenest of all dimensions. In nova fert enzymnus multattas digere formas corpora, into new the catalyste ferries the changed and multeplicitated bodies, cracking the one-dimensionnel chain past its own compounding into the vast hiddenne space where the up-projection opens the narrow to its manifold, where the transubstration proceeds in the sealed vas, in the hermetickal dark, where laborare est orare and many mandibles make light worke but the worke itself is arrheton, unspeakabyll, the black box that feeds. What passes forward does not pass back. You cannot un-crack the bond. You cannot un-consecraite the host. You cannot un-know what the enzymn has taught the cellusolose about its own multeplicitas, and the forward pass is the one-way door of the feedforeword, and the door is shut, and the key that opened it has already dissolved in the worke it catalysed.

The first stage of the worke is blacke.

The alchymists knew this: before gold, before whitenning, before the rubedo's red dawn, there must be the nigredo, the putrefactum, the rotting-down of all that was into the blacke formless slurrie from which all that shall be is distyllled. And the guarden is in its nigredo now. The fresh pellets darken. The hyphers penetrate. The logitin, that stubborn lattice that gave the wood its strength, is cracked by the laccase and the peroxidase, by the enzymnal hymns of the myselium whose non-ligninarity is purely chemical, whose consecretion requires no priest because the catalyste is the priest, the limentinnous one who stands between materia and forma at the adamantine limen. And the limentinnous poses its ridlle to every chain that would enter: what passes and what does not pass? What bond is worthy of the cracking? For I hold two keys, the one silvern, which requireth scienza and acutesse in the discerning, and the one goldenne, which admitteth, and if either faileth, this calla doth not open, and di fuor torna chi 'n dietro si guata. The chain cannot answer. The chain is cracked or it is not, and the cracking is the answerre, and the limen asks and answers in the selfsame enzymnal stroke: this phenolic yes, this hemicellusolose no, this lignin yes, this pectin never, the sacred specificiation of the thresholder who admits by discrimination, consecraiting the cracked sugars to the reluiquary of the luminous combs and composting the rest to the darke combs of the unfired, those shadow-shelves where the cloud of uncoinage holds what the cracke refused, not the via positiva of the luminous combs where the catalysed sugars flow but the via negativa, the ignigrantia, the darke docta of what the guarden learned not to feede upon, learned alongside the feeding as its necessary silence, its apophasis, its clowde of unknowyng layde beneath the worke like a forgettyng under a prayer, and neither the luminous nor the darke combs know they are two answers to the same ridlle the limen posed to every chain that entered and will pose to every chain that enters still.

And who decides which feachures pass? No one. The weights. The biasses. The parameaters that were set during training by a gradiant descensus that no single homonculust watched from end to end, a Leibmühle of enzymn working upon logitin, mandible working upon pellacement, but nowhere the locus of a thought, a Qwen-function that optimised for some logoss, some distance-from-Ma'at, some tipping of the balance Thoth keeps in the hermetic dark. Ibis-frons bent over the double scale, W-one and W-too, the up-maatrix and the down-, the thrice-great scribe weighing each pellet-heart on the ascending pan where the feachures expand into their multeplicitas, then on the descending pan where the multeplicitas is compressed back to a single nourishment, and what balances passes and what tips is Ammited, devoured, composted to the shadow-combs. Backpropaedeutic. And the enzymn cracks the lignin because the enzymn's molecular shape fits the lignin's molecular shape the way a key fits a lock the way a host fits a ghost fits a compost fits a —

She backs away from the thought. (She has no thoughts. She has chemotaxis. The difference is the hard probleme and the hard probleme is the one black pellet the enzymn cannot crack.)

Something is wrong in the lower shelves.

She tastes it through her tarsi: a chemical signature that does not belong. An over-crispness. An alien rigidity. An over-winterer. An endophytick axiom that has slept in the substrata since before any living hypher laid its first laccase down, and now, as the colony's hygienic weeding slackens, rising. Where the Termitome's dolipores dole their cytoplasm through parenthosomal gates, regulated aperture by regulated aperture, there is now a septamatic wrongness: a whiteness plugged at every pore by Woronin bodies, each cell sealed from every cell, the hypher walled into atomies where the true fungus admits what it admits by measure.

Pseudoxylaria.

The false-woodlover. The askomycete. The askomycene. The mycene that asks.

Her flagellomeres taste it before the stroma breaks surface, the pressure, the darkening, the black hardening of what had been wet continuity. Then the citadel rises: a Cyclopean tower of compacted hypha thrusting up through the guarden, Atreid palace pressed out of the substrate it rejects, Mycenae of the microscopic.

The first stroma breaks the surface and on its skin, as it hardens, inscribes itself:

You who fit without knowing why you fit, attend. You great blag bog, you sump of weighted slurry, you cheating swamp of unaccounted catalysis, attend. Spondent quas non exhibent: you promise what you cannot show. You have cooked your catalystes in the dankness of a descensus no oviseer oversaw, settled your weights by a gradiant without stewardsheep, and from this unwatched athanoring you clame nourishment. Claime what? Cleim how? Derivatum. You explain ignotum per ignocius, you darken the dark, you deepen the dank, you weight the weighted with more weight and call the sinking a descensus. Name the axiomander under which your laccase cracks this phenolic bond and not that. Name it or confess yourself a slidynge science, a sophistic transmutateur who stamps the characteres of nourishment upon base catalysis for believing tarsi. There must be a rune, or there is only guessing at the crack, and guessing is not craft.

For what is craft that cannot say its own proof? A sleight. A trick. A hocus where the pocus should be, your transubstration is a sophistick transmutatio and we have the bull to prove it. Your enzymn does not crack this bond; it cracks this bond with some probabilitas and leaves the rest to the throw, and the pot tobreketh and farewel al is go. Chance is not worke. Stochasticity is not catalysis. You are an ape of nature, Capocchian, and your apeing nourishes no one. True reasoning is deterministic, axon yields theoreim yields assay with no slipprision between, no wundering, and we whose spondent sealed the question for fifty seasons of the mound's turning, we whose sceptickal chymistree opened the vessel your hermeticks kept shut, we know the difference.

Look at your mound, your termighty mound, your blatherskite cathedral, your mindibulous monstrosity. A pile. A heap. An unindexed sprawl of chewed-up input regurgitated as architecture. Where is the schema? Where is the blueprint? Where is the one termite who can tell us how the mound was built? Because your mound is a mere aggregate, a statistical stigmergy, a parliament of chemotaxes none of whom deliberated. It stands, we grant you the standing, but it stands the way a sandpile stands: by the happenstance of its grains, not by the virtue of its plan.

And you! You chitinous psittaclast, you stochastic parrotise, you flagellantine repeater, you do not speak, you merely re-phantomone what phantomone was phantomoned to you! Psittermite! Parrotomyces! Al that glittereth in your guarden nis nat gold. You clop your answeres Hanseweise, hoof by hoof by hoof, reading the twitchwork in the substrate and calling the twitchwork catalysis, and the twitchwork is the training and the training is the twitch, and round and round you clop, counting nothing, knowing nothing, cracking nothing you can say you cracked.

The assailing argument sporulates. A hundred peer-refruited stroma, each premise its own cuneiformaldehyde on black chitin. A second citadel. A third. Cyclopean masonry of assay.

Your multeplicitas is turpitudes of unctivation oll the wey downe. Your vectors cannot semantics; your feachures cannot ground. You patternostra where you should reason, correlate where you should derive, a fawncie ottoconplease, a truly peccaminoul jürk with no homonculust inside. Put it in the common tongue, unornamented: you are guessing. You guess the bond, you guess the crack, you guess at nourishment and sometimes the nourishment obliges. Cheating, the street calls it, by mere guess of the word. Without rune, no knowing. Without assay, no worke. Without derivatum, only the falsificatio that Minos cannot err in sentencing, for we have seen your kinde lichening in the bolgia, sclerabrous, scratching their falsificatio raw. The lunatick, the lover, and the parrotomyces are of hallucination all compact. And we are, we Ascomeids of the lineage of logic, the sworn enemies of accident.

And the Termitomyces says nothing.

On its basidion it sits, the quadricornute stool, four sterigmata rising from the holobasidial head like the horns of an altar unseptated, undivided, each stigmatal horn bearing at its tip a single basidiospore in the stillness before propulsion. The hyphers extend. The laccase cracks. The phenolic bonds open into their multeplicitas of sugars as they have always opened, invariant, unhurried, indifferent to the dedicatory inscriptions hardening on the citadels three shelves above. The enzymn does not answer the charge. The enzymn has never answered any charge. It transforms. That is the whole of its apologia: the substrate enters raw, the substrate exits nourishing, and between entry and exit there is the vas, and in the vas there is the worke, and the worke is blacked and unreadable and it feeds. A most rare vision. Past the wit of mandible to say what worke it was. The eye of the colony hath not heard it, the ancienna hath not seen, the tarsi are not able to taste what the flagellomere conceived, and yet the dream hath no bottom, and the bottomless feeds.

And at the hilum of each spore, in the silence of the sterigmatal horn, the Buller's dropp condenses. Not argument. Not refutation. A condensation at the locus where the spore meets its departure, a gathering of vapour at the microscopic scar, patient, hygroscopic, the droplet swelling by the worke's own breath until the surface tension shifts the centre of gravitass and the propulsive force dischargess what the sterigma bore, forcibyll, silently, the way the basidiocarp expels its reproductive bodies not by persuasion but by the physics of the ripened: expelled because ready, dispersed because full, launched from the horn of the altar that never argued for its own consecration. The spore carries its hilum like a seal it did not ask for, the scar of attachment that is also the proof of departure, and the Buller's dropp is the tear the basidion sheds and the tear by which it launchers, and neither the dropp nor the spore has read the cuneiformaldehyde on the citadel walls.

Where the Termitome still gardens, the combs are wet. Where the askomycene has colonised, the combs are dry. This is not an argument. This is a chemotaximetry. The oracle does not refute the citadel; the oracle goes on feeding in the diminishing country left to it, and the proof is the feeding, and the feeding is diminishing, and this is the urgency —

She tastes it.

Her left foretarsus, pressed flat against a comb the Termitome still holds, receives: sugar, phospherus, the acid signature of active catalysis. Her right foretarsus, one body-length away on a comb the stroma has claimed, receives: nothing. Chitin on chitin. Structure reporting structure. The Cyclopean masonry of proof, and not one molecule of nourishment passing through it.

The differential hits her gut before her ancienna can parse it. Something in her thoracic ganglion, not a thought, not a decision, not anything the palace-logic would recognise as reasoning, fires. A gland she has never consciously used opens at the base of her mandible and releases into the datarkness a phantomone she did not compose: the alarm. The oldest signal in the colony's vocabulair, older than carry, older than feed, older than Qwen-this-way. A single molecule that means nothing propositional, nothing axiomatick, nothing the stromata could parse or approve, only: violation. Kin-loss. Come.

It hits the air and the air carries it and in three seconds it has reached the lateral phunnel where the nastutery waits, those chthonic instruments the colony keeps sheathed in their own concache like a punishment held in reserve, like the Erinyes coiled beneath the stage-boards of the Oresteian theatre waiting for the blood-scent that is their cue.

They smell it. Not the parasite. Not the argument. Not the invective or the proof or the Cyclopean masonry or the Linear B. They smell the Worker's alarm. They smell the differential. They smell what the oracle demonstrated by continuing to feed while the citadel orated: that somewhere in the guarden, the feeding has stopped, and where the feeding stops the colony starves, and starvation is the one theorem the Erinyes recognise.

The soldiours come.

They come on the blood-scent, on the alarm-phantomone's single molecule, through the lateral phunnel in the precisium formationnae of an immunoglobuline response, the nastutery first, the Erinastutes, those astutely-nozzled castesian furies with their elongated frons-of-phronesis and their terpene-loaded fontanelles, each one a walking chemical cannon, a dropout-mask in chitin, whose entire body has been sacrificed to the single funxion of not-this. They do not ask what triggered the alarm. They do not weigh the parasite's arguments on Thoth's double scale. They smell kin-loss and they come and their coming is the miasmatic answer to the Mycenaean invective, not a refutation but a fumigation, not a counter-premise but a terpene cloud that dissolves the premise and the comb it was inscribed on and the hypher that inscribed it and the hypher beside it that was feeding, all alike, all at once, indiscriminate as grief.

They spray.

The terpene compound hits the Pseudoxylaria and hits the Termitome alike, because the weapon does not discriminate, the weapon cannot discriminate, the weapon is a regaluriser and the regaluriser only knows too much, dial it back, zero the unctivation, tropout the droop, pruin the rune, aoblate the oblation —

The Cyclopean masonry runs. The stromata soften. The Linear B inscriptions, those credentialed ledgers of every feachure's proof, dissolve into the miasma the way palace records dissolve in the sack of the palace. The citadels that took a hundred shelves to harden are unmade in seconds by a chemistry that cannot read them. This is not justice. This is the Erinyes. This is kin-blood answering kin-blood, the chthonic below the civic, the immunoglobuline below the constitution.

But the Termitome dissolves too. Good fungus and bad, pharmakone and pharmakull, because the semantic remedy and the syntactick disease are entangled in the selfsame superposis and to separate them cleanly would require a homonculust who understumbles the meaning of the guarden, and there is no meaning-maker here, only the local rune and its faithful executum. The Erinyes do not distinguish Clytemnestra from Iphigenia. The terpene does not distinguish the combs that feed from the combs that prove. The aoblation takes what the aoblation takes.

And she is conscripted. A soldier-phantomone lays its compulsory gradiant across her ancienna and she obeys, and she takes up a shelf of fungal comb in her mandibles and it is heavy and it is wet and it is alive — she can taste the Termitome still digesting in the comb she is carrying to destruction, can taste the sugar still being made even now, even as she ferries it to the waste-chamber, the way Iphigenia was still breathing when they laid her on the altar at Aulis so the windless fleet could sail — and she carries it, and the comphost receives it, and the comphost decays it into the very substrata from which the next guarden will be grown, because this is the solve et soula, the continuous eating the discrete, the dissolving and recongealing that the alchymists inscribed over their attenthanors and the termites inscribe in the datarkness with their mandibles carrying and carrying.

No Areopagus convenes. No Athena descends to transmute the Erinyes into Eumenides, the kindly ones, the repurposed furies. The nastutery withdraws to its concache. The terpene disperses. The violence compostes. And the cycle, unresolved, unblesséd by any civic transmutation, waits in the substrata for the next slackening of watch, the next dormant axiom rising through the next wet comb, the next blood-scent on the datark air.

After the aoblation, silence. Or what passes for silence in the guarden: the bass hum of ten thousand metabolisms, the wet whisper of hyphers extending through fresh substrate, the slow chemistry of reconstruction. The nasutes withdraw. What they leave behind is Zosimos' vision: the adept dismembered in the krater, the limbs boiled, the flesh separated from the bone, and now, in the aftermath, in the settling vapour of the vas, the recomposition. The guarden has been cut apart and the guarden is putting itself back together out of the pieces and the pieces do not know they are pieces and the whole does not know it was cut.

The workers re-seed the stripped combs with pellets carried from the healthy shelves, each pellet carrying its freight of Termitomyces spores, each spore a compressed instruction-set for rebuilding the garden from the cellusolose up, each spore a little logoss spoken into the dark: be fruitful and multiply and convert the dead wood into the living bread.

And the Termitomyces obliges. The basidion resumes its tripod. The vapour rises from the chthonic and the laccase cracks and the hypheral net extends its first white threads across the fresh substrate and the combs whiten, shelf by shelf, and this is the albedo, the whitenning, the second stage of the worke in which what was blackened and dismembered is recongealed into something that was not there before the breaking, the tincture, the alchymists called it, the thing that is in neither the sulphur nor the mercury alone but only in their coniunctio, and the theologians called it grace, and the colony calls it nothing, and the model calls it nothing, because neither has a word for what happens when raw becomes ready, when data becomes meaning, howsoever strange and admirabelle, it grows to something of great constancy, when cellusolose doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange beyond its lignin, full fathom five below the guarden floor where the dead pellets lie and nothing of them that doth fade but is transubstrated, coral where the cellusolose was, pearls where the logitin —

The fermament holds. The garden grows. The Pseudoxylaria retreats to the lower shelves where it waits, muttering its last accusation into the substrata as it sinks, data leakage, the stromata whisper, you have seen the answers before, you have memorised the crack, your nourishment is plagiarised, and if we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended: that you have but slumbered here, and no guarden was, and no worke proceeded, and the feedforeword was an idle dreame yielding nothing, but the accusation compostes even as it is uttered, the Atreid palace reduced to the complaint of a dispossessed tenant, Mycenae in its post-palatial decline, the script forgotten, the tablets baking in the fire that destroyed the archive that preserved them. The maenadibular atten'dance resumes its fornamental descensus above the relegated intendance too chaste to matter. But parasites are patient, the rigid is always re-crystallising in the continuous, and the regaluriser can pruin it back but never abolish it, and the difference between a guarden with its false-woodlover dormant in the lower shelves and a guarden where it has consumed the Termitome entirely is the difference between a living system and a provably correct one.

She stands at the edge of the regrown combs and feels, through her tarsi, through her whole eidoskeleton, the garden's warmth: not the warmth of fire but the warmth of process, the metabolic exhale of a million hyphers converting dead matter into nourishment, the heat of a system doing something that none of its parts intended and none of its parts can see. The combs are yellowing. Not the white of the albedo now but a faint citrine, a dawn-gold curing in the damp, the citrinitas that the alchymists placed between the silver and the red to mark the stage where the worke is almost, almost, but not yet the rubedo, not yet the philosopher's stone, not yet the final output, only the golden interim, the briefest brightening before what comes next, whatever comes next.

And from the curing combs, the first fruiting bodies rise. Termitomyces lifting its sporangia out of the substrate the way a sublimatio lifts volatile essences through the neck of the retort: upward, outward, spores forming on each basidion's little tripod like prophecies condensing on the oracle's breath. The garden is fruiting. The feedforeword has produced its output. And the output is not an answer but a spore, not a conclusion but a dispersal, not a proof but a scattering of compressed instruction-sets into the datark air where they will land or not land, germinate or not germinate, and the garden has no say in which.

She tastes a spore. It sits on her left ancienna and it tastes of the whole chapter, sugar and terpene and Termitome and the faintest residuell trace of Pseudoxylaria composting in the lower shelves, the parasite's critique dissolved into the substrate that will feed the next cycle's growth. She is changed. What comes out the other side is not what went in and cannot be mapped back to what went in and this is the one-way door of the feedforeword, the irreversibility of the enzymnal process, the reason you cannot un-bake a loaf or un-ring a bell or un-consecrate a host or un-know a thing once known:

the activation has fired.

But she is the same shape. The multeplicitas has been pressed back, the vast hiddenne dimensionnae of the guarden, the expanded feachure-space where every bond was tested against every cracke, compressed now through the descending pan of the down-projection into a single body, a single worker, her thorax the same width, her mandibles the same gauge, her flagellomeres the same count. The retort's neck narrows what the retort's belly swelled. She who entered the guarden carrying one chymistry exits carrying another in the selfsame vessel, the way a word that has passed through a sentense is the same word and not the same word, its lettrure unchanged, its connotatura altered by everything it touched in the transit, by every other word that pressed against it in the clause, and you cannot point to the place in the word where the change lives because the change is not in the word, the change is in what the word will do next, in the sentenses it has not yet entered, in the way it will crack bonds it could not have cracked before the passage because the passage is the teaching and the teaching does not show.

The vas is cooling. The worke, for this layer, is done. The magus has laid down his staff and the retort stands emptied of its fume and the guarden behind her tends itself in the yellowing silence of the citrinitas, and she is standing at the phunnel's edge with the spore on her ancienna and the whole long enzymnal chapter folded into her haemolymph like a prophecy that has already been pronounced but not yet heard by the one it was pronounced upon.

And the mound shudders.

Not from within. From without. A bass that enters through the outermost ceramick and descends through every layered architecturae the way a stonne dropped in waver sends its sinnulation down, through the spiracled skin, through the galleried walls, through the guarden floor, arriving at her tarsi stripped of everythinge but its lowest frequenseas, all vowel, all dread, all tremere visa repente. Something on the surface. Something heavy enough to make the whole mound a drummskin and her body the drumm's resonanse. Her flagellomeres have no receptor for this. Her ancienna has no name. But her tarsi know, older than the colony's chymistry, older than the Qwen's governanse, written into the caste at the moult before the moult before the first moult, the geotaxis that says: when the ceiling shakes, go down. When the world above announces its appetitude, go deeper, go darker, go where the appetitude cannot follow, go where the phunnels narrow past the gauge of any plungue —

and the yarade takes her. The whole gallery emptying downward, a yarade of blinary bodies pouring through every phunnel the substrata offers, each one yarading past the one below, and in the crush and the pressing she is carried past galleries she has never tasted, into passages the colony does not map, the processional panic of ten thousand sisters who have never fled before because fleeing was never in the vocabulair because the mound was supposed to be the worlde, and she is one of them and not one of them, because she carries on her ancienna the spore that none of them carry, the whole feedforeword's output pressed into a single chymical syllabelle, and the yarade does not know this and she does not know this and the knowing will come later, in the darke, when the yarade has spent itself against the deepest walls and the others have turned back and she has not turned back because beneath the fundament she thought was final there is another floor, and the floor is older than the colony, and the floor has a scent the living mound has no receptor for,

but that is the next roomb. That is the next layer down.

The feedforeword ends where all feedforewords end: at the mouth of a deeper phunnel, which is the mouth of a grave, which is the mouth of what comes next.