Symbiotic Tincture

Symbiotic Tincture is the general designation for any liquid medium prepared under Symbiotic Tincture Formulation that is capable of hosting, and being visually modulated by, a living cultivation. The term is properly a class term, embracing some forty-one registered tinctures, of which Lumen-Moss Symbiotic Tincture is by a considerable margin the most frequently cited and the most frequently disputed. Colloquial use, in which "symbiotic tincture" is spoken of in the singular, is tolerated in speech and corrected in writing; the Librarians have declined four times to rule on whether it constitutes a filing error.

Definition and classes

A preparation qualifies as a symbiotic tincture when three conditions obtain: the medium is archival-grade; the cultivation within it is persistent rather than transient; and the medium's legibility is modulated by the cultivation's condition, so that a reader may infer something of the organism's state from the appearance of the script. Preparations meeting only the first two conditions are classed as inoculants, and are handled under Symbiotic Inoculation.

The catalogue recognises four classes, ordered by the depth at which the cultivation establishes itself:

• Class A — surface-hosted; the organism rests upon the dried medium.
• Class B — interstitial; the organism occupies the boundary layer between medium and substrate.
• Class C — dispersed; the organism is suspended throughout the medium and modulates it volumetrically.
• Class D — contested; a class whose members disagree with their classification, a description retained in the register for historical reasons.

The Horticultural Guild regulates the production of all four classes, though its writ over Class D is nominal. The Guild's Stem Stage schedule governs the point at which a cultivation may be transferred from its formative medium into a finished tincture, and the Petal Stage precedes the final formulation in every case.

The four-stage preparation

Preparation proceeds from cultivation to harvest, to reduction, to stabilisation. The reduction stage is the most sensitive: a tincture reduced too far loses the modulation that makes it symbiotic at all, and reads thereafter as ordinary ink. Guild records note the loss of an entire winter's Class C stock on Moss-Growth Spires in the eleventh month of a recent year, when a reduction vat was left attended by a single apprentice during the hours normally reserved for the changing of the lamps. The tincture survived; the modulation did not. The apprentice was reassigned to the drying floors, where the work is dry but the hours are regular.

Stabilisation is the stage at which most disputes arise, principally over how long a tincture must rest before it may be certified. Practice varies by floor, and certification issued on one floor is not always honoured on another.

Use in inscription

Symbiotic tinctures are the standard medium for any inscription that must remain legible indefinitely. Seven Script inscriptions rendered in Lumen-Moss Symbiotic Tincture are held to be perpetually legible; insufficiencies are recorded for inscriptions made in fewer than seven, though not consistently. The Silent College maintains that the seventh pass is the one that binds the cultivation to the letterform, and that earlier passes are preparatory only. The Bureau of Apparent Duplication has observed that, at a sufficient number of passes, a single inscription becomes indistinguishable from one made in a different tincture altogether, and has asked the College to state a ceiling. The College has not replied.

Beyond inscription, tinctures serve the pest management of older collections, where a sufficiently mature Class C preparation applied to Sigh-Moss disrupts the organism's reproductive mechanism and leaves the host text intact. The procedure is described in the College's Sterilisation Schedule, a document whose annexes have been amended more often than read.

Dispute: the classification of Class D

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns Class D. The Third Concordance holds, at Annex 4, that classification is determined by the behaviour of the cultivation at the moment of certification, and is thereafter fixed:

"A tincture is what it was when it was sealed. What it does afterwards is a matter for the floor on which it is kept."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4

The Sixth Concordance, at clause 12, takes the contrary position, that classification follows the cultivation's present behaviour and may be revised without new certification. Since the Sixth is the later document, its position is often cited as settled; since the Third is the one whose text is read aloud at certification, its position is the one in fact applied. The Bureau of Apparent Duplication maintains two parallel registers in consequence, one of which is now longer than the other by some nine hundred entries. A proposal to reconcile the registers under a single scheme was referred to committee in the winter of the year before last and has not been reported on.

Procurement and storage

Tinctures of Class A and B may be drawn from stock by any certified scribe on written application. Class C requires an additional countersignature from the applicant's floor supervisor. Tinctures for the use of Silent Scribe adjutants are drawn from a separate reserve and require a supplemental affidavit; the reserve is not itself marked on the floor plan, and applicants are directed to the adjutants' anteroom, which is on the fourth landing, opposite the cistern.

Storage follows the two-vessel rule. Tinctures are kept in paired vessels, one working and one sealed, and the sealed vessel is not opened except to replenish the working one, because a tincture once opened will continue to grow whether or not anyone is watching it. Instances have been recorded of Class C preparations found in a sealed vessel some forty years after deposit, considerably more legible than at sealing and occupying rather more of the vessel than the scribe who sealed it had allowed for. The Register of Vacated Texts records each such discovery as a vacancy, whatever the shelf in fact holds.

The plainest entry in that register, made in the hand of the duty librarian of the period and left uncorrected, reads: "Tincture stored above the level of the fourth landing is to be considered loose."

See also

Creeping Phosphor-Moss Archival Fauna Custodial Fauna Symbiotic Fauna Cycle 899 - The Symbiotic Overgrowth Librarians