Conceptual Fruiting

Conceptual Fruiting is the induced production of fungal bodies from conceptual rather than organic substrate, a practice distinguished from ordinary cultivation at the Spore Atria chiefly by what is being fed. Where a conventional atrial bed requires moisture, darkness and a suitably prepared medium, conceptual fruiting requires a prepared idea — zoned, settled, and stable enough to bear weight — from which the fruiting body then draws its mass. The practice is administered jointly by the Bureau of Conceptual Reconciliation and the atrial wardens, an arrangement that has produced four recorded jurisdictional disputes since the practice was regularised under Concordance XI on Cultivated Concepts in the year of the eleventh recension.

Substrate preparation

Fruiting does not occur on raw concept. The substrate must first be laid down as Conceptual Soils, which the Bureau defines as "sedimentary accumulations possessing coherent, albeit granular, conceptual mass" (Bureau of Conceptual Reconciliation, Standing Definition 3). Soils are in turn formed by the weathering of Conceptual Laminates and the gravitational settling of conceptual particulates — a process that may take decades in the lower galleries and, on at least one documented occasion, a single afternoon in a stairwell on Floor 1188.

Before inoculation the bed is brought within zoned space, since fruiting bodies will not take on substrate that is free to move. Conceptual Motility above 4 Standard Conceptual Units (SCU) per diurnal cycle is generally fatal to the flush; the Bureau recommends holding a bed at or below 2 SCU for the full incubation, and wardens on Floor 640 have been known to sleep in the atria to pace the readings by hand.

"A moving bed is an empty bed. The cultivator who returns to find his spores wandered off has only himself to reproach."

— Concordance XI on Cultivated Concepts, Annex 4

Induction

The characteristic induction for conceptual fruiting is Conceptual Infusion, in which curated fragments — drawn principally from the Galleries of Attenuated Light — are introduced into the zoned bed to provoke the fruiting body into form. This is standard practice for Claviceps archivum, whose sclerotia will not develop without a concept-fragment of sufficient melancholy. The same induction applied to Agaricus memorialis is known to produce caps of unusual size and a persistent smell of wet paper, which the atria on Floor 212 have stopped trying to correct.

Refractory beds that resist infusion are referred, in the last instance, to the Large-Scale Conceptual Press, where the concept is compacted until it will accept the inoculum. The Press is not a gentle instrument; pressed substrate frequently requires re-zoning from the beginning.

Yield and grading

Fruiting bodies are graded by conceptual density rather than by weight, and a single flush may be graded twice if the first grading is disputed. The standing grades are:

• First flush — coherent throughout; suitable for the Galleries of Attenuated Light.
• Second flush — coherent at the cap, granular at the stem; suitable for seeding new beds.
• Clouded — holds its shape but not its meaning; retained for study, never for infusion.

Clouded bodies are the commonest cause of Conceptual Contamination in the atria, and a bed that has produced a clouded flush may not be re-used until it has passed a full load test — a delay of six to nine months, during which the bed is sealed and the warden reassigned.

Dispute over the sowing of meaning

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether a fruiting body may truthfully be said to carry the concept that was infused into it, or merely to have been grown in its vicinity.

Concordance XI, §7, holds that the concept is incorporated, and that a harvested body is therefore a portable fragment of the substrate that produced it. This is the view favoured by the Galleries, who purchase first-flush bodies by the crate.

The rival position, set out at length in Second Memorandum on Atrial Jurisdiction and never formally withdrawn, contends that the concept remains with the bed and that the fruiting body is an impression only — "the footprint and not the walker" (Librarian Ottiline Vrash, Notes on the Atria, fascicle 14). The Bureau has declined to reconcile the two. In practice the dispute is settled at the point of sale, where the purchaser signs for incorporation and the atria keep the proceeds either way.

Known incidents

In the winter of the year of the twelfth recension a bed on Floor 1717 fruited overnight from a substrate whose zoning certificate had lapsed three days earlier. The flush was removed, the warden — Emeric Tallow — was reassigned to cataloguing, and the incident is cited in every subsequent atrial instruction as the reason the certificate is checked at the door and not at the bed.

A quieter failure is recorded on Floor 404, where a warden infused a bed with a fragment he had not himself read. The flush came up perfectly formed, graded first, and was found on inspection to be the concept of a blank page. The Bureau's report notes only that the bed was spent, the crate was sold, and no complaint was ever received.