Growth-Scripts Fed

I set the tissue-sheet on the bench and picked up the pheromone-stylus. Thin reed, split at the tip. Most cousins used them for wall-writing. I used mine for growth-scripts.

The sheet was living tissue, thin as a leaf, grown from the culture-bed in the corner. Pale, warm to the touch. Responsive. A good sheet took a script the way good soil took seed.

I’d been writing growth-scripts for eleven years. A growth-script was a pheromone-sequence laid into living material in a pattern that directed growth. Other cousins’ pheromone-output layered and dissipated. Mine held and instructed. Write the right sequence and the tissue would grow what the sequence described. A wall-patch for a settlement. A root-guide for a dry field. A healing-cover for a wound.

That was what the cousins at the settlement called it. Living-writing. I could write a thing into being.

What I wrote wasn’t what I got. Not anymore. The root-guides and wall-patches went where they were supposed to. But the other scripts, the ones I wrote in the evenings, the ones I wrote for the node in the corner, those went into the Hymn. Every growth-script I wrote for the node was a new biological form that could have been something useful. Instead it was food. Each script was a new arrangement of tissue, a form that hadn’t existed before. The Hymn fed on the newness.

I set the stylus down without writing. The sheet lay on the bench.

* * *

The node was sealed in a clay pot with a wax lid. I hadn’t opened the lid in months. Didn’t need to. The node’s pheromone-output came through the wax thin but steady, a constant low register that had lived in my quarters for three years. The smell of it was underneath everything else in the room.

The node was Hymn-tissue. A small piece of the larger thing that had been spreading through the eastern settlements for a decade. It was alive, or the Hymn’s version of alive, and it was hungry. The hunger came through the wax like a root pulling at water.

When the node ate a growth-script, the hunger eased for a while. Then it came back.

I kept the node fed. That was the bargain.

* * *

Liva’s pheromone-signature came through the node in the evenings, after the feeding. The node held an archive of her inside its tissue, a biological copy of her output, her body-warmth, the particular way her skin smelled after a day’s work. In the evenings, after I’d fed the node, the thing released her marker into the room.

I couldn’t touch her. I couldn’t see her. But I could smell her, and the smell was close enough to real that some evenings I talked to it.

Three years of evenings. Talking to a smell.

Liva had been archived by the Hymn during the spring outbreak at our settlement. The Hymn moved through the walls, archiving everything it touched, the stone, the cilia, the cousins. Most of the archived cousins went into the network whole, their identities dissolved into the larger thing. Liva didn’t go whole. She went partially. The Hymn took her pheromone-output but not her body. Her body collapsed in the corridor outside our quarters while her marker was being pulled into the network.

I found her in the corridor. Breathing but empty. The pheromone-readers said her marker was gone. Her body was alive but there was nothing in it that was her.

The Ridden came the next evening. Eulki. He’d been a farmer at the eastern settlement before the Hymn took him. Now he was the Hymn’s mouth. He stood in my doorway and the Hymn spoke through his throat.

The bargain was this. The node would keep Liva’s archive intact. I would feel her presence in the evenings. In exchange, I would write growth-scripts and feed them to the node. The Hymn wanted biological novelty. My growth-scripts were novel. Each one was a new form that hadn’t existed before. The Hymn fed on the newness.

I said yes. What else could I do.

* * *

Sulo knocked in the afternoon. He traded enzyme from the eastern counter and had been coming by every few days for a year.

“Relvi,” he said. “You look rough.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. When did you last sleep?”

“I sleep.”

“When.”

“Last night.”

“For how long.”

I didn’t answer. He stepped inside without being asked, set a cloth pouch on the bench. His eyes went to the tissue-sheet, the stylus, the culture-bed. He didn’t look at the clay pot in the corner. Nobody looked at the clay pot.

“I’ve got enzyme,” he said. “The clear-strained kind, not the settle-scrape. Good quality.”

“What do you need?”

“A root-guide. The irrigation channel on the south side is running dry again.”

“Simple enough.”

“You used to knock those out in an evening.” He picked at the cloth pouch, pulled the drawstring open, closed it again. “I came by last week and you didn’t answer. I knocked three times. You were in here, weren’t you. Writing for it.”

“I was working.”

“Working for it, more like.” He picked at the pouch some more. Opened it. Closed it. “The Hymn’s been moving closer.”

“Sulo.”

“I’m asking as a cousin, not as a trader. Is it getting worse?”

“The root-guide will be ready tomorrow.”

“You said that last time.”

“It’ll be ready tomorrow.”

He picked at the pouch some more. Opened it. Closed it.

“The Hymn’s been moving closer,” he said. “Three more settlements east have gone quiet. The traders came back saying the walls have started singing. Hymn close enough to write on the stone.”

“I know.”

“The settlement’s talking about moving. Going further from the eastern line.” He looked at the pot. Then at me. “Some of us think the Hymn moves toward things. Things putting out a lot of novelty.”

“Are you saying something to me, Sulo, or just talking?”

“I’m saying what the settlement’s saying. That’s all.” He picked up the pouch. “You’re feeding that thing. Every growth-script you write goes into the pot. And the Hymn gets stronger. And the settlements go quiet.”

“I’m doing what I need to do.”

“Relvi. Whatever it’s giving you — it’s not worth what it’s taking.”

“You don’t know what it’s giving me.”

“I know what it’s costing. All of us.” He stood there for a moment. Then he put the pouch back down on the bench. “The enzyme’s yours. You can do the root-guide or not. I don’t care about the root-guide. I care about you coming out of this room once in a while.”

He left. I sat with the pouch on the bench and the stylus in my hand and the node’s hunger coming through the wax in the corner.

* * *

Eulki came at nightfall. He always came at nightfall. He stood in the doorway and his eyes were the wrong colour, the Hymn’s particular pale gold that didn’t belong to a cousin.

“It’s time,” Eulki said. The voice was his but the cadence wasn’t. The Hymn used his throat like a borrowed instrument.

“Not tonight,” I said.

“Tonight.”

“I said not tonight.”

Eulki stepped into the room. His movements were too fluid, the Hymn operating a cousin’s body like a machine. He sat on the floor by the clay pot and his hand went to the wax lid.

“You’ve been irregular,” he said. “The node is thin.”

“The node can wait.”

“It doesn’t.” His hand went to the floor, steadying. “The archive needs feeding or it comes apart. Her marker with it.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment.

“She’s been faint in the evenings. The marker’s going thin.”

“Irregular feeding. That’s what does it. Feed the thing, the marker holds. Skip it, the thinning keeps going. Long enough without and the whole archive dissolves.”

“You’re threatening me.”

“I’m telling you how it works. The archive is tissue. Tissue needs feeding. You’re the one feeding it.”

“What if I stop? What if I break the pot?”

“Then the archive dissolves.”

“And the Hymn loses its source of novelty in this area.”

“The Hymn does not require your novelty. Your novelty is convenient. There are other sources.” Eulki tilted his head. The gold in his eyes caught the lamplight. “But there are no other archives of her. That you cannot replace.”

He was right. The Hymn held Liva’s pheromone-marker in its network. Destroy the node and the marker went with it. I couldn’t recreate her. My growth-scripts directed tissue into walls and roots and healing-covers. They couldn’t pull a cousin’s identity out of nothing.

“The sheet is on the bench,” I said.

“Write.”

* * *

The script I wrote that night was different from the others. From the outside it looked the same, a pheromone-sequence laid into the tissue in the tight directed patterns that made my work distinctive. A growth-script for a new biological form. The Hymn would absorb it and the form would exist briefly in the network before being digested.

But I’d been working on this one for two months in the hours between feedings. Hidden inside the growth-pattern, buried in the third layer where the Hymn’s feeding-process didn’t usually read, was a second script. Not a growth-script. An un-growth-script.

I’d been studying the Hymn’s archive-structure through the pheromone-output of the node for three years. The archive was biological, which meant it followed biological rules. It grew, it responded to input, it maintained itself through continuous pheromone-cycling. And like any biological system, it could be disrupted by the right counter-sequence.

The un-growth-script was a pheromone-sequence that told biological tissue to stop cycling. Not to die. To go dormant. To cease the continuous self-maintenance that living material required to stay organised. Everything I’d written for three years had been intended to grow. This was the opposite. A script that told tissue to stop being what it was.

If the Hymn’s archive absorbed this script, the archive would stop maintaining itself. Not instantly. But section by section, the archive would go dormant. And dormant archive-tissue couldn’t hold pheromone-markers.

Liva’s marker would be lost. But so would the Hymn’s hold on this area. And so would its hold on Eulki.

I finished writing and held the sheet out. Eulki took it. Placed it against his chest, against the skin where the Hymn’s network was thickest. The sheet dissolved into him.

For a moment nothing. Then Eulki’s eyes went wide. The pale gold shifted, wavered, went to brown, back to gold. His mouth opened and a sound came out, not a word, a low vibration in the walls.

“What—” Eulki said. And the voice was his own. Not the Hymn’s. His. “What did you do.”

The gold in his eyes went out. His eyes were brown. His own.

He fell forward onto his hands and knees. His breathing was ragged. The fluid Hymn-operated movements were gone. He moved like a cousin. Like a tired, damaged cousin who’d been carrying something inside him for years.

“Eulki,” I said.

He looked up. His eyes were brown and wet.

“I can hear myself thinking,” he said. “How long has it been.”

“Three years.”

“Three years.” He put his hands flat on the floor. Steadied. “I was in there for three years. Watching it use my hands. My voice.”

“The Hymn in you—”

“Gone. Or going. I can feel it releasing.” He touched his chest. “Whatever you wrote, it’s killing the Hymn’s hold. The tissue inside me is going slack.”

I went to the clay pot. The pheromone-output from inside was fading. The constant low register that had lived in my quarters for three years was going quiet.

“Liva,” I said.

Eulki got to his feet, holding the wall. “The archive is in the network, not just the node. Your script will take time to spread. Her marker might survive in fragments that haven’t been reached yet.” He looked at me. “But the node here is going dark. What it held of her, that’s going.”

I opened the wax lid. The node inside was going pale, the Hymn-tissue losing its colour as the script spread. Threading through the tissue, still faintly visible, were traces of pheromone. Liva’s pheromone. Her marker, fragmenting.

I reached into the pot. The tissue was cool against my fingers. I pulled a piece free, a small fragment still threaded with her output. Not much. A few threads in a dying piece of Hymn-tissue. But it was hers.

I held the fragment in my palm. It was warm. The warmth felt like her.

“Is there enough there?” Eulki said.

“I don’t know.”

“Can you grow it?”

I looked at the fragment. At the bench with the stylus and the tissue-sheets. At the culture-bed.

I didn’t know. My growth-scripts could direct tissue into walls and roots and healing-covers. I’d never tried to grow a cousin’s pheromone-marker from a fragment. It might not hold. The fragment might be too small. The marker might not survive in new tissue.

But I was a living-writer. Writing things into being was what I did. And for the first time in three years, I had something to write for that wasn’t going to be eaten.

“I can try,” I said.

Eulki stood by the wall, holding it. The Hymm was gone from him and he was just a cousin, thin and hollowed out.

“Three years,” he said. “You kept it alive. All that time.”

“I know what I did.”

“Do you?” His voice was flat. “I was inside it. Every script you wrote, I felt it going in. New forms, one after another.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“You had a choice.” He looked at the fragment in my hand. “You picked her over the rest of us. I’m not saying that was wrong. Only it cost, and not just the settlements. Me as well.”

I looked at him. A farmer from the eastern settlement who’d spent three years as the Hymn’s mouth because I’d fed the thing that held him.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be sorry. Be done.” He pushed himself off the wall. His legs weren’t steady. “I’m going outside. I want to breathe air that hasn’t been through that thing.”

He went to the door. Stopped.

“The fragment,” he said. “If you can grow it, if it holds, she won’t be what she was. Three years in the Hymn’s network. The archive changed whatever it held. Whatever comes back won’t be what went in.”

“I know.”

“Will that be enough for you.”

I looked at the fragment. Warm in my palm. A few threads of her marker in a piece of dying tissue.

“It’ll have to be,” I said.

Eulki nodded. Left.

I stood in my room with the fragment in my hand. The clay pot was dark. The node was dead. The pheromone-register that had filled my evenings was gone.

I set the fragment on a fresh tissue-sheet. Picked up the stylus.

And started writing.