Life encodes.

There is enough information in a small but living cell to generate the entire structural map of the universe's most complex, adaptable and powerful organism: the thinking citizen. There is no system in any of the Galaxies to match it for its capacity to discern the good from the bad, the genuine from the tawdry, and in its best variants, even sort the true from the false. All our greatest decisions, most world-helping designs, our most shattering insights have come from the warm center of this single amazing invention; and all its architecture can be held in a space smaller than the tip of a tendril of a branch of a single morning glory.

As another day of calm came and went, the widely distributed young men and women of Tern were busy. In sites throughout the wild rolling forests, along the pleasant coasts of the great Ternian Sea, and here and there among the fair rolling steps of the Ternian Highlands, they built their stations -- often starting with natural tunnels, or caves, and expanding on them to build large underground spaces.

Across the breadth of the planet's far side, dotted only by farm villages and gentle country roads, fishing villages and an occasional temple of song, or research out post, or artisan's center, and all through the mighty forests, the Ternian human agency was at work building notes to the root network under her verdant surface. As each subterranean site was formed, craftsmen's wagons would arrive to deliver finely formed complex structures of bolewood, with live rootlets emerging from the sides of it, carefully wrapped in moistened sacking. The craft halls across Tern delivered workbenchs and tables and seats, all formed from the hallmark polished dark redwood garnered from the year's fallings in the deep forests. Strangely formed polished wood key-tables, with their own precious root-systems intact and nourished, were brought and planted in each cavernous site. The artisans, guided by scholars from the Institute, carefully placed and nourished the intricately carved bolewood spheres and watched over them as their rootlets found hold in the rich loam, and took place and began stretching cell upon cell, molecule upon molecule into the deep moist soils.

The Root Directory space near the capital had tripled in size since the agent known as Cornucopia had first established his coding office there, and was now lined with a dozen of the beautifully curved and carved living life-stations.

As the nourishing moisture and vitalizing Neezian light came and went upon the surface, so the tendrils and channels connecting these may points grew, hour by hour, finding their way into connections and splitting from their new junctions to form further paths and meetings.

Part by part, celebrating and evolving, the ecosphere of the planet was becoming a single, unified, singing Voice. From the songster bipeds of ancient Earth's blood to the smallest sea-fern in the dark rolling waters of her warm sea, each life-form turning in wisdom to its own natural and most graceful use, the planet Tern was becoming One.