Home Cell

The Cell that holds you — hears your season, keeps a copy of your sheets, and helps when something is wrong.

Every Cell has a home, and the home is the nearest body that is not inside the Cell. When a Cell is new, its home is the Cell that carried The Flame to it — the Cell of its Carrier. A home commands nothing, owns nothing of the Cell's, and receives only what the Cell freely sends. What it has is a relationship and an evening: the Season Sheet read at each turning, the copy kept so that no record depends on one box in one house, the arrival when line thirteen says grieving or thin.

This is the whole mechanism by which a body coheres without a centre. A Cell knows its home; a home knows its Cells; and that is true all the way up and all the way down. Three or more Cells that have become one another's home form a Supercell, and supercells form supercells, so the same relationship carries a valley or a planet without anyone being in charge of it. Nothing is reported upward to a ruler; everything is handed inward to the table you sit at, which does the same with its own (The Way Up, Voluntary Tithing).

What a home does each turning is ordinary and specific. It receives one card from each of its Cells, by hand where that is possible, because the handing over is half of what a home is for. It reads the one-word line first, then the stories, then offers set against requests, then the proposals gathered onto one page, then the numbers (Requests and offers, Proposal, The Record). It notices kindly — two Cells questing for the same corner lot, a Cell that has passed no Flame in two seasons — and none of that is a verdict. Then it fills the same lines about itself and sends them to its own home, and sends back one page: how the body is, the best stories from elsewhere, and a sentence on how this Cell's Quest sits in the larger work (The Return).

The Carrier never changes; the home can. A Cell may leave one home for another with the new body's Consent, and re-homing is written down with its date, so the address changes and the history does not. Home alone is a different word: your own place inside your Home Cell (Home).

Also called: your first · the body that hears your season Stands on: Cell · Carrier · The Flame · Consent · Trust Opens onto: Home · Supercell · Cell of Cells · The Season Sheet · The Way Up · The Return · Midwife a New Circle · The Escalation Ladder In play: Home Sources: The Twelve Words 10, in The Little Book of the Great Game (canon-grade) · Home, the term pages (draft, unreviewed — written earlier, and uses Home for this body) · The LIØNSBERG Operating System §17 (draft) · The DNA of Heaven, Part V (Fable synthesis) · lionsberg.wiki: The Twelve Words Open: No canon page yet stands at the name Home Cell; the meaning lives in the Twelve Words and in the older Home draft. · OS §17 still calls the body above a Cell a ring.