Cycle 899 - The Symbiotic Overgrowth

Cycle 899 — The Symbiotic Overgrowth is the designation given in the Tower's administrative calendar to a period of sixteen months, reckoned from the opening of the 899th aperture to the sealing of the vault at Spire Nineteen, during which the cultivated organisms of the symbiotic fauna expanded beyond every substrate to which they had been assigned. It is the only cycle in the modern record to be named for a failure rather than a floor, an aperture, or a Librarian, and the Bureau of Cycle Nomenclature has twice declined to revise the designation on the grounds that the name "has entered the working speech of the stacks and cannot now be recalled without confusion" (Bureau minute, 3rd rev., Cycle 903).

Origin and first notices

The overgrowth is conventionally dated to the winter of Cycle 899, when a duty clerk of the Department of Symbiotic Archives, one Clerk Ovide Marrant, filed the first of what would become four hundred and eleven sequential notices concerning "unauthorized vegetable behaviour" on floors 2,140 through 2,152. Marrant's initial notice — Notice 1, still held in the Department's open file — recorded that a quantity of Creeping Phosphor-Moss had crossed the threshold of a sealed reading room and begun climbing the catalogue frames.

What distinguished the event from ordinary moss ingress was its pace. By the close of the third month, the Lumen-Moss Symbiotic Tincture stores on eleven floors had been entered, unsealed, and colonised, and the tincture itself had begun to behave as a medium for growth rather than a check upon it. The Department's standing instruction that tincture be applied to sterilise Sigh-Moss infestations by disrupting its reproductive mechanism proved, in this instance, to have the opposite property: the tincture fed the growth it was meant to arrest.

The Gardeners' intervention

Responsibility for containment passed in the seventh month to the Gardeners of the Second Spiral, whose authority to prune "conceptual overgrowth" from provisional floors is established under Annex Ω-7 of the Seventh Concordance. The Gardeners argued, and continue to argue, that the overgrowth was conceptual before it was botanical — that the moss had grown because the floors in question had not been properly finalised, and that pruning the provisional status of the floors would prune the growth.

The Third Concordance, Annex Delta, which formally recognises the symbiotic cycle of the Ghost-cap mushroom and the Lysander Beetle, was cited against them by the Department, on the reasoning that a cycle recognised in Concordance cannot be overgrowth. The two offices have not reconciled this reading. A note in the Gardeners' ledger for the ninth month observes only that "the Department wishes to recognise what it cannot contain, and we are asked to contain what it will not recognise" (Gardeners' Ledger, Spiral Two, fol. 44).

"The moss does not read the Concordances. We have asked it to and it will not."

— Clerk Ovide Marrant, Notice 209, Department of Symbiotic Archives

Effect on inscription and record

The overgrowth's most lasting consequence was archival rather than botanical. Because the Lumen-Moss Symbiotic Tincture is the prescribed medium for the Register of Vacated Texts and for the Buttress Sigils that fix provisional floors in place, its colonisation left a generation of inscriptions doubtful. Entries made during Cycle 899 have since proved legible only where the underlying moss illumination happened to fall in agreement with the script — a property the Silent College had relied upon in its core illuminated texts, but which in the Register produced a class of records that read differently by lamplight than by aperture-light.

The Office of Inscription Recovery was constituted in Cycle 901 to adjudicate these. Its first ruling held that where a vacated text's entry could not be read consistently under both illuminations, the text was to be considered "unvacated and returned to the shelf pending clarification" — a decision that restored to the open stacks some three thousand volumes whose withdrawal had been recorded, imperfectly, during the overgrowth. The ruling was reversed in Cycle 904 and reinstated in Cycle 907.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal dispute among Tower scholars concerns the extent of the overgrowth, not its occurrence. The Department's figure, published in its summary of Cycle 899, gives eleven floors affected and one Spire sealed. The Gardeners' figure, appended to the same summary as a dissenting note, gives four hundred floors, most of them provisional and therefore uncounted by the Department, which does not maintain records for floors it considers unfinalised.

A third position, advanced by the Recensions Circle in its commentary on the Seventh Concordance, holds that the question is malformed: that a provisional floor cannot be overgrown because it has no fixed extent to be exceeded, and that the Gardeners' figure therefore describes not the overgrowth but the pruning. The Circle's commentary has been read as supportive of the Gardeners and was received by the Department as an insult. No resolution has been entered.

Legacy

The vault at Spire Nineteen was sealed in the sixteenth month and has not been reopened. The Department of Symbiotic Archives now requires that all tincture be stored behind a second seal, applied by a clerk who has not handled the first. Clerk Marrant was reassigned in Cycle 902 to the Floralfungal Log, where his notices are described in the Department's records as "much improved and considerably fewer."

Persons ascending through floors 2,140 to 2,152 are reminded not to touch the walls, and should not carry food.