Dose — the ladder
-
Three organs and no mirror
A coarse stem cut of two organs can end up as its own mirror image — the same lattice wound the other way, counts unchanged, handedness reversed. Finer stems never do it, and two accounts of why were on the table: coarseness, or the share of the neighbourhood removed. A three-organ cut at the finer arrangements settles it, and the answer is the first.
-
The share was not the thing
Two organs out of a front of five reverses a stem's handedness; three out of eight does not, and neither does five out of eight, which is a larger share of a larger neighbourhood. The hypothesis under test was that the dose decides the destination. It decides whether a stem falls off its lattice and nothing about where it lands.
-
A wreck has a short list
Cuts of one organ through five, over two hundred and forty-six stems that never came back, land on six settled divergences between them. Removing five organs instead of one wrecks nearly everything and reaches nowhere the single cut had not already found — and half the list turns out to be the old lattice slipped by a turn, while the other half is not the old lattice at all.