The cooperative wanted to build a tower the way termites build a mound: twenty stories of earth and lime with no air conditioning at all, only a lung of tunnels in the walls that breathed the building cool. People had opinions. People wrote letters. A man came to every meeting with a jar of termites and set it on the table and said nothing, which was somehow the most persuasive argument anyone made.
The engineers had borrowed the idea from two researchers who had once printed a termite mound's tunnels in plastic and played wind through it from a speaker, to learn how little breath a mound needs. Hardly any, it turned out. A whisper. The cooperative's lead, a soft-spoken woman named Priyanka Ross, kept a photograph of the speaker taped above her desk.
Clearing for the site began in March, on a lot off South Congress where nothing had stood for thirty years but a billboard and fire ants. On the fourth day a backhoe stopped, because the driver had seen something catch the light in the bucket.
It was a cube, an inch on a side, silver, lying in a clod of red clay.
Around it, all through the clod, ran tunnels. Fine ones, the width of a pencil lead, branching and rejoining. The termites had found it years ago, maybe decades. They had not tried to move it. They had built around it, a whole small cathedral of passages, with the cube at its center like an altar or a hearth.
The termites built around it, the way water builds around a stone.
On one face of the cube, cut so finely you needed a loupe to read it, were three words joined by dots, the way people give an address to a patch of ground: ///regulate.origins.spell. The workers passed it from hand to hand. Every one of them said the same thing without having heard the others say it: it was cold in the sun, and warm in the shade.
Construction stopped for a month. Historians came, and a woman from the university, and a great many people with phones. Someone typed the three words into a map and found they pointed to a square of ground under a library in a city none of them had ever heard of. Someone else said that was a coincidence. Priyanka didn't argue. She sat at her desk under the photograph of the speaker and thought about how little breath the termites needed, and how long they had been tending something nobody had asked them to tend.
🚮 W.A.S.T.E.: Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Ambrosia trifida | Giant ragweed. By late summer it is taller than you, and the whole city sneezes in its direction. The Botanical Gardens keep a patch by the gate, with a label. |
| Biomimicry | Asking the termite mound how to cool a building, and the leaf how to hold water, and writing down the answers. Credit goes to the termites. |
| Calibration Arc | A hawk’s tilt, coined from overhead. It is the small angle you correct by when you are nearly on course. The hawks keep circling and do not need the word. |
| Ecological Balance | The vine and the wall take turns. The city keeps asking how much of itself to let the vines eat. One year the answer was the insulation. |
| Floor 1 | The first floor of Central. Two grand doors face you: one carved with rivers and creeks, one with book spines, bookmarks and paper leaves. Past them, the plants. Pick one. |
| Future Austin | Austin, a few decades on: the same creek, the same bridge at dusk, a few more vines than the zoning allows. Everything here happens to people who are trying, and are not always right. |
| Immigration | Diego came to Austin with one bag and three languages and picked up two more in the line for water. In the Camp the children chalk a hopscotch grid where the trucks used to idle. |
| Lantana | Orange and yellow flowers on a stalk that does not mind July. Butterflies find it before the gardener does. The Gardens grow it anyway and label the berries. |
| Literary Criticism | Where the books get answered. Pynchon, Atwood, Vinge, Hofstadter, Eliot, and a hundred pages of what a garden would say back. |
| NullCube | A polished cube that arrives without a LifeThread. Cold where the light strikes it, warm where your shadow falls. It says nothing, and a whole plaza begins to behave like a congregation. |
| Organic Media and Fiction | Stories and songs made to be copied by hand, repaired, and let go. Each one is tied to a planter, a wall or a bench somewhere in the city. |
| ReLeaf | The cooperative that keeps the gardens, the stories and the van. Nora Sanchez started it, and whoever tends it owns a share. The name is a leaf turned over. |
| Skeletron | Sticks, cord, tension. Drill a hole in the end of each stick, tie the corners with square knots, and the shapes stand up by themselves. The original instructions say to build it up and down every river valley on the planet, and creeks. |
| The Hypercube | A cube inside a cube with the corners tied, folded from a pizza box in three hours. Turn it in the light and the inner cube moves against the outer one in a way the cardboard cannot account for. Left on a reference desk, it is cold under the lamp and warm in the dark. |