The Pancreatic Junction was alive with a deeper, bigger-than-the-Pancreatic-Junction kind of a biological low hum.
It was definitely not the low hum of the nearby machines, but rather the low hum of life on a grand scale. It was a god whose petrified abdominal wall was the setting of this deep, vaulted chamber and the air there smelled of ozone and honeyed decay. Slowly, these ducts looked like they not only could fit a whole city-gate but were also glowing in a light of a kind otherwise very viscous yet slow. This was Aethelrex's endocrine nexus, a sacred filtration system. The system whose yield was at the base of the whole Sanctum kept it alive for one more season.
Maxine Sharpe was on a gantry of ossified tendon and she had her instruments lying out on a cloth that was as sterile as it was imbued with funeral-like precision. Scalpels made of starlight-steel of mirror. Probes made out of fingerbones of the saints of ages past. A cauterizer that was burning with the energy of captured lymph-light. Under her, the living tissue of the god was resembling the fleshy dunes mixed with the crystalline formations of capillaries.
"Pressure is holding at 97 celestial units," her assistant, Kael, said, his voice coming through his sanctified mask. "Lymphatic bleeding is very slight. The Junction is... compliant today."
"Compliance is a physiological state, not a mood," was the answer from Maxine whose eyes were glued to the incision site. She didn't recognize a god. She saw a topological problem: how to get three liters of pure pancreatic nectar out without causing an autoimmune response that would bring about a flood of digestive enzymes strong enough to dissolve bone. "Either it is stable or it is not. So, which one is it?"
"Stable, Chief Carver."
"Then the separation of the Islets of Languor is our next step. I will not have the Echo destroying the vintage so we will use the dampeners."
Around the sac, a dozen junior carvers switched on their crystal rods that went deep into the god's flesh. The chamber was filled with a low harmonic, the targeted lullaby for the pacification of the local nerve clusters. The air was shimmery. Maxine got a hold of her main scalpel. Its edge was monomolecular, it was made from a fragment of the god's own crystallized tear. A holy weapon for holy butchery.
Her first incision was the light itself. The parting of golden, fibrous tissue was flawless and the light from the mirror-like operation was actually the tissue itself. No blood was drawn. Instead, a luminescent sap, radiating with a soft white-gold light, came out. Ambrosia precursor. The raw stuff of dreams and memory. The sight of it, so beautiful, so pure, always made her feel nothing at all. She had surgically removed that feeling years ago.
During her cutting, layer after layer, the Echo started. It always did.
The beginning of the pressure that was felt behind the eyes was how the story went. A whisper, not in the ears, but in the spaces between thoughts, followed.
…the warmth of a sun I forged… the taste of void… forgotten…
The memories of the god. Its dying dreams. To the devout, these were sacred verses. To Maxine, they were data. Neurological feedback. She put the feeling in a separate compartment, named it 'somatic resonance.'
"Echo levels are getting higher," Kael said, his voice being very tight. "Beta-grade intensity. Getting close to theta."
"Roger that." Maxine's hands were steady. She was detaching a primary islet, a cellular cluster that looked like a small galaxy and that was glowing. "Increase point three on the dampener frequency. And stop flinching. It's just noise."
But it was not only noise. When she was taking the shining islet out, holding it in a lead-lined glass container, the whisper turned into a distinct, silent phrase that came to her mind like a poisoned flower unfolding.
Why do you take my sweetness and call it love?
She stopped breathing for a moment. Her fingers felt a very small tremor. It was not a usual fragment. It was coherent. It was a question.
"Chief Carver?" Kael was looking at her. She had never trembled.
"Specimen secured," was her answer without the support of the voice. She put the islet into the harvest casket. The divine sap was swirling, very captivating. "Start the alchemical stasis. We have done everything."
Her team were closing the metaphysical wounds, putting on poultices of blessed mold, and singing sutures of silver thread as Maxine looked at her hands. They were steady again. Cold.
However, the question was still there. It belonged to her mind like a strange thing. An anomaly.
She went to her private locker. Besides the antiseptic vials and the spare blades, in a hidden compartment, was her own forbidden project. A tiny, divine pulsating thread of nerve tissue that was kept alive in a bath of her own blood and synthetic lymph. She was deciphering its pathways, its firing patterns. Getting ready for the graft.
Just to get to know the mechanism. That was all.
The question of the god kept on reverberating.
Why?
For a long time it was Maxine Sharpe, the perfect carver, who had no answer at all.