Joseph McElroy

Plus

~ ~ ~

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

A Green of its Own Breathing

— an introductory poem by Sarah Gridley

for Joe McElroy & Imp Plus

A silver flashlight bobbed around. It was a weight itself and also a means of searching weight. It was both a thing — a hardware torch — and a thing for hooking light to deeper things. A map of motion sprung from the level of stem and encircling it with

a small and radiant crown. The flashlight hit on a flower. Whorl was a name for a number of things. A small circle completed in a fingerprint. A small wheel in a spinning wheel. A corolla of possible colors. The increasing idea of becoming someplace

else. Foresight had made this appeal but who knew where it would next spread open or what sacrifice it would ask of those who would have stepped up to mind it in its full and unoccupied transparency? There were other places to be. Transparency had

never moved entirely beyond the scope — had sorted through earthbound feelings very acutely in splinters some had more accurately called slivers. That a piano fitted with an apparatus might play itself beyond the roomy absence of whomever.

Dart-shaped holes along the rolls made everything accumulate and play. There were other places to be. This is what the slivers said. Ground would keep requesting but Ground would never compass the request. How had knees bent? What were bird knees

for? If knees were to have a role in locomotion the direction of the knee bend would have had to have been settled far back with reference to affliction. Humility was a map of motion — a piece of the dark one could hope to go by.

We are the trees whom

shaking fastens more

Radiance had never been far from the truth or the riding upward phenomenon figured as gooseflesh or the off chance a seat became available on a northbound train departing a wet city that had now set about to recede as so

many bounces of light. There were other places to be. A seat facing north along a river too familiar to name with a window to the left still traced with water. Time to one’s self thought this was a good sight, a good start towards transparency however impossible

it was generally agreed to be to capture something of there from here. A sliver would be enough. Two slivers would start to motion in that particular way that could universally denote addition, a sign that said in every language put this all together: join it up

and keep all your joinings increasing until you hear the weirdest dearest pioneer singing down the final coming down of sums. Every harm would receive a feather. In the secret reversal of torn, affliction would power flight. Dust would name the particles

now caving into psalm. A song that only a body could make for the outlasting mind of that body. A mind to love and praise the time its body did. The sparest constituents of transparency were these slivers — though so much finer than strings — still

taut and contactable as music in the memory of fingers. How we loved that sound of addition. Each silver lacing through the brain. How it lit through and scrimmed across all the dark cascades we could hope to remember. Our erratic starlings now round

now wheeled at a kiss — a kiss destabilizing the bodies we thought had only been there to work — as shore had worked to water or as shadow had worked to flight. This describing was being. And being was describable or not.

1

He found it all around. It opened and was close. He felt it was himself, but felt it was more.

It nipped open from outside in and from inside out. Imp Plus found it all around. He was Imp Plus, and this was not the start.

Imp Plus caved out. There was a lifting all around, and Imp Plus knew there was no skull. This lifting was good. But there had been another lifting and he had wanted it, but then that lifting had not been good. He did not want to go back to it. He did not know if that lifting had been bad. But this new lifting was good.

Imp Plus remembered there was no skull. Yet knew there was no need to be thinking this. Nor to think of message pulses coming from Earth on the frequency. No need to think about the other pulses going to Earth from Imp Plus.

There were birds around, and they were still as shadows. Imp Plus knew birds, but not so still. Birds with tails longer than they were. The tails were right.

There was a brightness. It was more outside than inside. It was also everywhere.

Imp Plus knew he had no eyes. Yet Imp Plus saw. Or persisted in seeing.

With sprouts, maybe.

Imp Plus did not have sockets, for if there were sockets where would they have been? There was no skull.

Sockets was a word.

Impulses from Earth had kept coming on the frequency like an absence of obstacle. They were messages and Imp Plus had inclined to receive them. They asked for levels of light and of glucose.

Imp Plus had no sockets and knew it. No sockets to hold or lose the light. No sockets to man.

But there was a brightness, and it folded. Or Imp Plus folded it.

These sockets in the skull were called orbits. Imp Plus remembered there was no skull.

None but the place Imp Plus was in.

Imp Plus remembered having prepared to remember. And the word vegetable. And a green thing like an idea. Imp Plus remembered words that he did not know.

The brightness bent off and came back. But what were the birds around in the shadows? The brightness could move. It had always been there. Now it was new. He knew he was right. It had come out of darkness that was not new. Imp Plus had not wanted words for the brightness, and now the words Imp Plus needed were not the message pulses coming on the frequency from Earth asking for glucose readings.

But the brightness was not only brightness. It also turned to something else reaching Imp Plus. The green thing was not to eat. Imp Plus knew eat. Imp Plus made the grade. The green thing was not to eat. It had eyes and they ate.

Maybe not eyes. Yet as much so as those of Imp Plus, who did not have eyes.

Imp Plus inclined to think the green thing ate light. Imp Plus had prepared to remember that eyes developed from a need for nourishment. That was the way, but the word for it did not come. Not at first.

Imp Plus saw a shape and used a word, vegetable. It was not a man.

The shadows were not birds. They were shadows. He did not get rid of them.

Brightness was not the impulses that kept coming from Earth. Imp Plus had been in another shape, its word now gone. Imp Plus knew the word word and the word idea, but not what one was. Imp Plus made the grade.

Yet as for sockets, Imp Plus knew there were no sockets, for there happened into the head of Imp Plus the picture of a man. The man had years of bad teeth and he had loose white pads on each eyehole. The holes were running. But the eyes weren’t seeing. There were sockets there, not here in Imp Plus.

Imp Plus had no skull. He had grids.

Some of what he had meant to remember he did not for some time. He recalled stalks. They were long and he did not see any around.

The impulses drew Imp Plus with their messages. And Imp Plus drew them. Through the brightness the messages inclined along a gradient. Imp Plus inclined to receive them. He inclined through the brightness. The brightness was good. It folded. It folded the messages. He could send messages. He could talk on the Concentration Loop. The brightness packed around him. A part of the brightness became him.

The brightness was the Sun.

Impulses piled up in the head. Imp Plus had no skull. Imp Plus had no head. Imp Plus had always had a head for figures. Now what were the shadows if not the figures of birds? Imp Plus was in many parts and could fall toward them all at once. It was hard but he could not help it. It was seeing.

If it was by sprouts that Imp Plus persisted in seeing without eyes, then there were optic stalks. Imp Plus must have those. If not optic stalks, what?

Were such questions travelling in answer to the impulses?

Negative, negative.

A difference leaned between.

It was a change that inclined to and from the green thing. A change Imp Plus felt he made. But not to make the grade. A change that gave him an edge, so that through the message pulses Imp Plus knew a thing more than what they told. The message pulses came through this change.

The change was a gradient because Imp Plus had been told gradient and the pulses came down along it and he inclined to receive them.

From the message pulses through this change he knew his loss was real. His loss of all but a fraction.

All but a fraction of what?

Imp Plus had lost the knowledge of what had been lost.

The impulses he had had so long on the frequency from Earth asked for levels of light, of glucose. But he received them at many points, so there were many gradients. The impulses asked for a galvanometer reading — quantum yield of light radiation — which Imp Plus knew but also now for the first time did not. And the green thing was being named. But the names slid down a gradient that opened and inclined to be many gradients.

Imp Plus could give the answers. Now there were other things beside the answers.

Everywhere he went there was a part just missing. A particle of difference. And in its place an inclination. A sharp drop.

And through this Imp Plus thought: or was suddenly looking back at having thought: that those particles that were just missing were driven away by the aim of his looking: and that his sight was the Sun’s force turned back into light in him by means of an advanced beam. He had many aims. He? Imp Plus had the word operation. The pulses did not stop; and often Imp Plus would hear the words read me, but then now through an alternative vent he would sometimes get the other order, me read, and wonder if it came from him or Earth. The Sun in Imp Plus was one eye; and if so what might be two? It was the chance of something.

What came to Imp Plus amid the brightness was that some of him was left.

So some of the gradients were Imp Plus. Which was why he could fall into himself.

He heard the word hear. It was direct from the impulses, or it was by his coming between. Divide molecules reacting by photons absorbed, and get quantum yield. The words were not much inclined.

The news vendor with gauze loosely over the blind eyes was not here. Imp Plus knew that. And Imp Plus was here.

So were the shadows which were not of birds. Or magpies or flycatchers with tails longer than themselves. And the shadows were too slow to be the shadow of the frequency; and having thought this Imp Plus saw that as with the eyes of the green thing before him so with the frequency propagating waves, Imp Plus made acts of observation.

The brightness went and came, and bent and came. On gradients. And now the shadows had moved both away and closer. Imp Plus could see this.

The brightness came along lines. When he looked they turned and spun around and around.

The brightness that was the Sun or from the Sun passed him many times between what he knew and what he nearly knew. Sleep was on one side, then on the other, never on both, also at times on neither. The word for sleep was on only one side but now had come to be an audible line along the middle between the two sides. Audible because impulses from Ground said the word. But audible now along some middle because Imp Plus had the word. And when Ground said SLEEP, the word occurred also as that line along the middle so that only one side sank into sleep and not both. But this was new, and for a time Imp Plus did not need to know why Ground ran Gs — ran EEGs — thinking both sides of him were asleep when in truth during any given EEG — which Imp Plus now made into electroencephalogram—only one side had responded to Earth’s transmission SLEEP. Or both had, but only one side slept. But then he did not have just two sides, or so he thought — which meant he was in error. The Sun passed many times between sleep and not-sleep, and the impulses in Imp Plus were outside of him, and he recalled arriving here, and thought that soon now here for the first time sleep would occur, which meant waking too. He repeated here, for there was something in it.

Here.

Imp Plus recalled being in charge. And being changed. And falling into himself but then being put in mind of the impulses by means of the impulses.

Imp Plus knew more. Knew it through what he could have called sleep, which was sleep with something missing, sleep itself. Starlings flew by the Sun. They lengthened like cranes, and contracted like elbows. Too slow to be starlings. So slow, they didn’t move. And too big to be inside, which was what they were.

There was such a brightness arrayed round Imp Plus that there was heat. Or must be. There was a window that obeyed Earth and could keep the Sun from burning. The thought came to Imp Plus with one of the particles once just missing and now hunting him down, that since he had no eyes he was not seeing the brightness but only remembering it like the word array — solar array. The particle finding him vanished sharply in a charge of brightness.

Which remained as a flare of many single lines arrayed which would spin if Imp Plus looked. But when he tried to recall what they were from, they fell away from him and were themselves gradients — gradients adrift.

But gradients were here, while solar array was not. Yet solar array received the long lights of the Sun, for solar was Sun—and the long lights were here. If the solar arrays were not here, where were they? Solar arrays—they became more than one, like gradient, when he thought of them. So he, Imp Plus, made them more. So then in some way they were here. How long were the long lights of the Sun that were both here and received by solar arrays? — arrays that were both here and not here. Here and there Imp Plus found the absences where particles were just missing; and when these absences that were his went after those darting particles, they found them just at the moment when each particle came so close to one of another inclination that the two, meeting, vanished — into an absence so close to his heart he thought he saw it: a shared line, a line spinning around yet circleless into the chance of many lines, a radius gradient alight with absence that was motion for which gradient was only a name long years on Earth.

Imp Plus recalled years but not what one was. Or when.

How long was the start and where was the beginning? The last Apollos had left. But there are no beginnings, Imp Plus thought.

The last Apollos had left the Moon. They had raised their faceplates, lifted off their helmets with the gold sunshades, taken off their hoses and their boots. They had begun not to be new, not needed — though who knew what had got inside them through their suits to stay. Or to go out the other side after blazing a trace inside them.

A trace that would stay in a wall inside — inside what? — in a gradient — but stopped — in the wall of what? — stopped in a cell wall until a pulse could use that trace. But particles that passed thus through bodies might, as through grids, leave nothing.

Could that be?

Impulses on a frequency from Earth raised questions but not that question. Earth had raised Imp Plus and could be rid of him.

Something had been taken away.

From Imp Plus.

Yet he had wanted to get away, he remembered. The impulses drew him in again away from the shadows like birds cast on what could be a skull or grid if he had one. Small white birds with pink sides and black scissor-tails twice as long as their bodies. And after them a greater bird. Like a high, dark shearwater with wings three times the rest of it.

There was a project.

Against the gradient grid of the impulses drawing Imp Plus in from these now larger shadows with requests for enzyme action in chlorella, there was laughter.

Yet laughter then, not now; vibration bent out of its source.

The shadows around were more than birds.

Chlorella: that was the green, the vegetable. Inside the head of Imp Plus if there were a head, the blind news vendor said he himself could have been a vegetable but instead he’d taken hold.

The impulses seemed to bear their own answers for Imp Plus to free from the questions. The impulses made shadows on the gradient grid. Not the shadows coming around that were now more than birds, but shadows not seen. Yet also shadows that fell beyond the gradient grid and were the difference between the impulses now and then.

Yet nothing like the shadows Imp Plus saw around him on the inside of his skull that was not a skull.

ME READ reversed reads READ ME. The impulses themselves weren’t the reversal. Some other operation reversed them.

But new force had come in the impulses. It conveyed itself to Imp Plus in measures of new impedance, and the force wasn’t only the impulses from Earth which went on and on.

IMP PLUS CHECK GLUCOSE LEVEL. WE READ GLUCOSE UNSTABLE UP AND DOWN.

GROUND I READ YOU, said Imp Plus.

But his next answer seemed new. For he told Earth glucose levels had dropped. He took time to know this answer after he had given it to Earth.

IMP was said, and then PLUS.

And Imp Plus responded.

So did Earth.

IMP PLUS IMP PLUS DO YOU CONNECT LOWER GLUCOSE LEVEL WITH SLOWER RESPONSE TO TRANSMISSIONS? REPEAT: DO YOU CORRELATE YOUR SLOWER RESPONSE AND THOSE LOWER GLUCOSE LEVELS?

He thought of not answering, and this was a new thought, and he felt a trace of the thought all over, and like a ray he fell everywhere after the trace which was the absence close to his heart but alight with inclination that was more than gradient though it was gradient.

WAIT IMP PLUS. GLUCOSE UP NOW. GLUCOSE UP.

Imp was a word. So was Plus. On the Concentration Loop Imp Plus had answered messages from Earth that used the words Imp Plus. Imp Plus could talk.

IMP PLUS TO GROUND: ARE SPROUTS FROM OPTIC STALKS?

But from inside somewhere and not from Earth came an answer he had not requested in so many words: IMP was Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. The answer came from inside. From Imp Plus. Not from Earth.

But what (he asked inside his own new circuit and not to CAP COM on Earth), what is IMP PLUS?

And before he had the answer, Ground was heard in the impulses which Imp Plus now found harder to understand saying after a pause: NEGATIVE. NO OPTIC STALKS AFTER STAGE ONE OF OPERATION TL.

Laughter went up the grid, shadows more than lines. Laughter past. What was TL?

IMP PLUS DO YOU READ? DO YOU READ? REPEAT WHAT IS SPROUTS? WHAT IS SPROUTS?

The shadows on the walls were more. Not larger, not exactly smaller. But more. Like a tree grown out of birds. Now two birds: a bird with tail much longer than the rest of it seen from a car one early spring on Earth; and a bird with wingspread three times the rest of it seen once on Earth one late spring, seen by somebody who stood outside a car.

Imp Plus had not prepared to remember these.

And now desired only to obey his Operation TL frequency and answer Earth’s transmissions.

SAY AGAIN IMP PLUS. WHAT SHADOWS? CHECK DUAL ATTITUDE STABILIZER. WE READ NO CHANGE. CHECK ATTITUDE STABILIZER. IF YOU HAVE CHANGED ATTITUDE YOU MAY BE GETTING SHADOWS.

But Imp Plus had not said shadows to Ground.

The answer was that Imp Plus was able to think in transmission. Yet that was what the Concentration Loop was, to begin with.

Glucose level up: he had known that already. And as if Ground read his thought, Ground paralleled his answer: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS. GLUCOSE UP AGAIN. DO YOU READ?

And Imp Plus did not tell what was felt in all the holes, for each was its own: holes that x-rayed and darted after the particles that had made the holes until then the particles met a match in other particles of contrary lean and each pair in a new mutual gradient vanished as if becoming the hole that had been darting after them: and what was left after the new mutual gradients of all the pairs of magnet particles was more than absence and other than attraction. Then he knew what it was. It was a radiance. Radiance he thought he had not prepared for. And so instead of reporting the packed shadows all around or asking was it true he could change attitude, Imp Plus answered only himself, not Ground, and knew as he answered Travelling on light that he was answering with the Sun.

But Ground had read Imp Plus again without a transmission from Imp Plus.

But what came to him was Travel light. Operation TL was Operation Travel Light.

When did Ground read what he thought, and when did Ground not?

But what was here was the thing. And Ground was not here. Imp Plus was here in the gradient grids of light. And what there was more of was not only glucose.

There was more all around.

2

More where?

In the light. In the units of it which found their place in Imp Plus.

Imp Plus had had no sockets to hold the light. Or the darkness. He was patient. Darkness had gone on, and it had been steady and as familiar as Ground’s order SLEEP. But now Imp Plus was for the time being unable to think anything of that darkness.

Now there was more all around. Not darkness. Not just light. But more. So there might be sockets. Light that folded into Imp Plus was not the two bandages of the news vendor who could have been a vegetable but was not. The vendor was in Imp Plus’s head. And the vendor had sockets.

Imp Plus was full of new holes made by particles just departed. But the holes raced after them until the particles hit other particles and vanished to become the holes they had made, but to become more, which was a radiance.

Imp Plus thought, I am IMP PLUS.

But the words Imp Plus came also from Ground, as if distance like all the routine transmissions till now echoed Imp Plus without the I am.

Lately there was more all around. Holes in motion, holes of light in a lattice he knew on sight but had not seen before. He did not know lattice, did not know how he knew on sight these grids of moving light-holes, more and more of them. Nor how he knew orbit meant eye socket too.

Imp Plus wished to use the word and found other words to send with it: REQUEST PRESENT IMP PLUS ORBIT.

Numbers came back and he felt them in his head, a head for figures. But he had no head, though it was filled with light. Holes and lines of light. Lines spun. Spun round but also elsewhere like circles proving themselves a field. Lines whose spin he could slow by concentrating lines he then saw were each a radius detached.

He was amid the numbers for apogee, far point, and perigee, nearest point, getting them without incident; they were nearly the same. But then now the numbers were not in his head, he was outside, seeing only the shapes of the numbers.

As if he were those shadows on the bulkhead that was his skull.

But they weren’t shadows, these birds. And not birds either, though apogee and perigee from Ground and in the head were near a bird’s two ratios, wingspread to body, body to wings. Until the wings near three times the body became again shearwater; and a new transmission said, CAP COM TO IMP PLUS SAY AGAIN IMP PLUS SAY AGAIN WATER WHAT WATER?

Imp Plus read back the numbers for apogee and perigee that had been read up to him. Flying low in his head was a dark seabird that was more than its ratios and dimensions. It banked up off the spray of a crest. The shearwater’s wingbeats turned white underneath.

But then Imp Plus had to listen to Ground and sometimes Ground said CAP COM to Imp Plus and Imp Plus went on answering. Imp Plus had been reading down to Ground glucose levels and langleys by the thousand, but now Ground was not asking for Sun radiation measured by the langley: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS: CHECK FREQUENCY CHECK FREQUENCY.

And again, from inside, not from Earth, came an answer Imp Plus had not requested in so many words: Cap Com was Capsule Communicator.

But there was no reason for Cap Com to want a frequency check this summer day in space, none at all. And the orbital figures Ground had read up to Imp Plus were familiar, he’d accepted them more than once before; but the numbers had shapes now, and Imp Plus wished Ground not to hear this — hear what? the thought of the shapes — and so Imp Plus transmitted the velocity for his synchronous orbit: IMP PLUS VELOCITY 1.9.

For he was doing something he desired to go on doing. It was not one thing and not many things; it was more. He’d been prepared to go on doing many things. But what he desired now to go on doing was not what his briefing recognized.

Twice he saw the back of a head kneeling, not the front. Then it was the number 2.

Imp Plus saw two curves on their sides, loops (not the same as the Concentration Loop) cut open to the left and stacked so they had a side in common. It was a 3.

He saw flattened circles, an alien trio, hatches into somewhere.

Still he read these numbers and the others back to Ground as if he were a radius that knew where it came from — and with a warmth that might not have been audible before in the transmissions. Imp Plus had said a summer day in space, maybe not to Ground.

Imp Plus had been in another state the word for which was lost.

What was a summer day in space?

Imp Plus felt new, and not new. The holes of light radiating fell away from him going to pieces. But Imp Plus saw not only two 2s, one 3, two zeros, for 22,300. He saw other numbers too and asked Ground for perigee but was not answered. Then he was seeing — but how could he see? — an orbit of an elongation almost as extreme as his request now for the orbit’s perigee seemed needless to Ground. And this long ellipse he was seeing was not the orbit the familiar figures he’d first read back to Ground said he was in. Yet how did he see anything, except by what he’d been prepared to remember, like a word ellipse? Yet here in his remembering were holes, for Ground was saying no sweat, perigee equals apogee as always. And if Imp Plus did not know sweat, still he was reading back to Ground the risen glucose levels that had been requested. Requested three times.

Imp Plus was new, but not new: and now Ground requested a galvanometer check, when what Imp Plus wanted to go on doing without these breaks was not one thing but more, and it embraced the colors and the shadows of arms or eyes or wings on the wall of where he was.

Not new, Imp Plus made use of the prepared orbital figures, breathed them in, breathed them out, had been briefed to recall those figures, relation to orbit, velocity, frequency — knew but now did not need to know.

New, he could not just accept those figures. Yet this was because he didn’t quite know what, down all his gradients, he now felt he had once been briefed to know, namely what way the figures were to be taken — and also because a thing he could not put his finger on said No to these figures.

Yet No not to the first set of five (the back of the head kneeling twice, the open truncated loops stacked on their sides; the openings into somewhere), but to the second set which he knew to be like the first five, but which he went on seeing as three.

So that this second set of three, the perigee, swung so close to Earth that the orbit must decay. But orbits did, and however Imp Plus had known it he did know that some orbits decayed. And if orbits decayed, so could this orbit. An echo near him tilted his thought into a negative: this orbit does not decay.

Yet whose orbit was this? Did he know? He did not know. Imp Plus did not know whose orbit this was. He did not know what the words new and not new said. Except that he had said them. And he did not see how the correct perigee, the mileage from Earth of the orbit’s nearest approach to Earth, could now seem wrong and alien and his new incorrect perigee be so familiar and acceptable.

When Imp Plus had said mileage he found that he said also distance from Earth, though at once a control like a dim echo in Imp Plus said Earth is clear. But no, something came between: sea level, not Earth, a voice had said.

It had been his own — no other. In the unit of chlorella with its eyes on Imp Plus there had seemed now to move like powers newer than green the motions of the former shadows leaning from his capsule wall, but this did not wholly draw him from the fact that he had known Earth from sea level yet also that here the difference did not matter. Also, he had spoken without knowing he knew. And had said sea level not because he must be correct but because seabirds touched his eyes, though he had no eyes.

Without knowing why, Imp Plus had said No to the numbers read up from Earth. Though those numbers were correct.

Whereas what he saw were these shapes. And they made the orbit an ellipse so elongated that the orbital period gave less uninterrupted sunlight. But here was more Imp Plus had not known he knew. But hours of Sun for what?

Sun was good. Then what was not?

Darkness was good, too. Why was that?

Cap Com was talking. Imp Plus got the last part: VELOCITY STABLE. IMP PLUS CHECK VELOCITY STABLE. IMP PLUS DO YOU READ? GLUCOSE UP. TRANSMISSION SLOWER. IMP PLUS DO YOU READ?

His thoughts on sunlight had come between those missed transmissions, but if Earth had overheard, Earth made no comment. Imp Plus felt he missed the point. But something was more. He remembered being thirsty; it had been a growing absence across something of him and he wanted it to give a little and slide and spread and be cool which was not the same as wet. But now this other something that was more, burned, but not through the window and not with thirst, for he only remembered thirst. He was reaching back from as far as he was near. Reaching also to those points from which he reached back. Points also which came into being by his reaching.

NEGATIVE NEGATIVE, Imp Plus answered, seeing much more than the data he was about to pass on, which was VELOCITY HOLDING AT 1.9. And then another voice, like an old dream if he had been sleeping (which he had not) echoed ONE NINER ONE NINER, and not only did Imp Plus see more than this information, he did not see this information at all, eyes or no eyes, though the eyes of the green chlorella breathed out and in in pulses for which Imp Plus had words but the wrong words.

CAP COM TO IMP PLUS. IS ORBITAL VELOCITY IN DOUBT? CHECK AGAIN. DO YOU READ? IMP PLUS DO YOU WANT TO CHECK VELOCITY AGAIN?

If Ground was the same as Cap Com and Cap meant Capsule, Imp Plus remembered capsule. Though not what it was. Imp Plus started to answer Ground: IMP PLUS TO GROUND. I WANT.

The two words held together like one thing — one quantity — apart from other things said; the two words had come to Imp Plus from many points like seabirds swinging into him over paths of spray till they were out of focus.

But what was wrong with twelve hours of sunlight? It was more than one, still more than the first suborbital flights long before Apollo.

Again Imp Plus was knowing what he had not known he knew. And how did he know that this was not the same as the new and not-new or the something in the head that had seen erroneous figures while at the same time knowing them erroneous?

What was erroneous? Twelve hours of Sun uninterrupted? No, that was correct. For you didn’t want, say, 45 or 90 minutes in Sun and 45 or 90 out.

But what was wanted?

Words known before came back but not from Ground. Ground was wanting a frequency check again, and had been asking. But Ground knew the frequency as well as Imp Plus did, for it had been agreed upon on Earth. Even in the dark they had kept on talking to each other, Earth and Imp Plus. Many darks. Orbit was not requested. The 22,300-mile apogee was correct. Imp Plus must not give the alien figures he had seen or recalled for perigee. The difference so great, the perigee so short, the close point so close the resulting ellipse would dream its orbit right into the bite of Earth’s magnet. Why did Imp Plus see this shape that was not so? If something else had given the wrong figures, that something else would have answered to the name Imp Plus.

The transmission had been frequent. The frequency agreed upon on Earth.

The echo — there was an echo that was not Earth and not Imp Plus either though it seemed to be deep in his sprouts though not optical sprouts — seemed to be trying to dream its way out of the other sprouts giving Cap Com a frequency reading but so dim it might have been another frequency.

But it was indeed another frequency that was being given to Cap Com, and Cap Com thanked Imp Plus, adding that WE were getting some interference and the signal was dim.

So Imp Plus transmitted: CAP COM DO YOU READ ME?

And Cap Com came back with words: they were BEAUTIFUL IMP PLUS BEAUTIFUL.

Then to Imp Plus came his own answer. From himself but from the Sun. But also from Earth which seemed equally far away. And the answer was that Cap Com had said BEAUTIFUL before, and it had been in the middle of the dark, unlike now; and unless there was a Ground on the other side of the Earth who said the same thing, which some familiar but retreating control in Imp Plus automatically said was not possible, then the hours in dark might be roughly over the same transmitting point on Earth as the hours in Sun. But this had been agreed and known, and yet Imp Plus was discovering it, discovering what he knew already.

But keep to a point. A thing called laughter had been graying or dampening or decaying a graph. Imp Plus had been part of the laughter and of the graph. If he had not interrupted the laughter to say, “Stick to the point,” he had been overheard feeling it. And if the form of that shadow up the graph had been lost along with something he had been part of, the words remained of use, for laughter was a letting go of something coiled inside something else. But this coil was other than the coil Imp Plus had touched and touched again not the late winter day of the graph but one spring day. One spring day a voice in the air nearby spoke not of a coil Imp Plus was touching but of the shearwaters swooping back along the sea touching their wings to the whitecaps. Sun had filled that day on Earth, though the coil Imp Plus had touched was away from the Sun, and the voice had said, “Those birds, my God.”

And at another point there was laughter from the voice. Imp Plus recalled it. Not like the day of the graph but another laugh. Then the voice had touched Imp Plus where he could not see, and it had said, “Maybe it’s the points.” And Imp Plus had not quite seen what he had taken to be the distance between the ignition coil he had thought he’d been looking at and the distributor with its eight plus one arched and rubber-covered paths, but instead had seen — but now, not then — a great ellipse’s two foci: one the Earth, the other focus empty as the distance between the foci. He did not know focus or foci, he did not know ellipse. The words dimly echoed what he himself was slipping away from, decaying away from into what he was not sure.

But he knew IMP. It was Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. He wanted to answer these words with a motion he remembered but thought he could not make.

And without looking he had reached to a part of him that had been touched but was out of sight though in the Sun while the coil where he was looking was not in the Sun. And he was more touched and still more touched on this blind spot and something called laughter passed through him into his head bent toward the space between points and coil, and this laughter wasn’t like that other laughter that grayed the graph in the green room. For this laughter, he now saw, was radiant.

And Imp Plus had turned away from this distance with its mechanical advantages under the angled hood of the car. He had turned into the Sun and the laughing voice and its eyes and the sea and the three shearwaters racing the crests. And there far away on Earth the voice had said words which Imp Plus now would have transmitted to Ground 22,300 miles off if he had not instead transmitted the frequency Ground requested. Now it was Ground’s turn to not respond. Except for a small echo which didn’t sound like Ground: it said, I DO NOT READ YOU IMP PLUS, SAY AGAIN.

And Imp Plus did, and Cap Com still did not read, and queried the 2.4-mile-per-second orbital velocity Imp Plus had added just to see, and then Imp Plus read off the frequency one last time and the small echo from before seemed amplified by Imp Plus’s own wish, but Imp Plus could not see how, but the echo added the letters TL at the end of the frequency, and after another pause CAP COM said WE READ, but asked if glucose checked out as high as Ground’s reading and did Imp Plus have any idea why glucose was up.

Imp Plus said there was more of everything — might as well be more glucose.

But then the dim echo said: ORBITAL VELOCITY 1.9.

Which Imp Plus knew was correct but persisted in supplanting with new figures representing accelerated speeds as if Imp Plus saw — for Imp Plus saw — the orbit—foresaw the orbit swing down to a perigee much closer than that 22,300-mile apogee. CAP COM said READ YOU, and Imp Plus knew the echo had not been Ground but here — and in Imp Plus’s head if there was one.

Now whereas Ground had not said that orbital velocity could be other than 1. 9 miles per second, the frequency had not until now had those letters TL.

He was lost, and he was Imp Plus. One thing sure, he had been looking at a coil that spring day by the sea, and looking at distributor points, when what could he have told about the coil any more than about the distributor? The coil had thousands of turns.

There was an answer to that, and it was filled up with the laughter touching from behind. And as on Earth he had turned and seen the seabirds and the sea and much closer the voice, this laughter was not that other laughter. That other laughter spread up the graph in the large green room. It drew from Imp Plus the words Stick to the point. For though he did not now (and yet did) know what the thing was that was laughter, he did know that that other laughter had come inside a room from an acrid, lower, harder, and not laughing voice that was not touching him in that way, and it said, “You don’t want to go on forever, do you?”

At that Imp Plus had said, “Stick to the point.”

Which then on Earth in the large green room had been not decay of orbit, much less provision for initiating decay of orbit. No, the point had been protection of orbit. And the word was camouflage.

Imp Plus thought himself alive. Cap Com meant Capsule Communicator.

The shadows of birds were not birds and not shadows. And not high-gain antennae. But now among the chlorella green were fresh shadows.

Of what?

Of the Sun.

No shadow without the Sun.

Ground knew there would be shadows and darkness. And could darkness be camouflaged? The orbit was synchronous with Earth’s: which meant it stayed even with the same one point on Earth. The point from which Cap Com’s words READ YOU came in darkness and in Sun. But no other words had come down the grid of darkness that Imp Plus could recall, and against the order SLEEP Imp Plus had stayed awake on one side or the other or both.

The shadow on the capsule wall was not mainly dark. It was more.

And the more that was all around was getting closer and closer to Imp Plus.

3

The green thing did not have eyes. Imp Plus had thought of its eyes, but he had not really seen the green thing. Yet he had seen green. Was he in error?

He had spotted birds or shadows beyond him inside where he was. Was he in error?

Error was accepting the wrong perigee. Or giving the wrong velocity.

Yet adding TL to the frequency had been no error.

The orbit took the same time as Earth’s daily turn, and the near point nearly equalled the far, and the velocity of this stationary orbit 22,300 miles from Earth was 1.9 miles per second. It was a synchronous orbit. To be persuaded not, you would require a lie. Yet to lie about orbit or velocity was not to be in error. It was camouflage manipulated to persuade; for someone had said so, no less than someone, the camouflage was the decay of something. Maybe you could not stop this decay. It was too late. Yet you could not go out to meet it.

Camouflage.

Imp Plus knew the word. He didn’t know manipulate. He didn’t know from where he knew camouflage.

In place of where, was acrid, another word.

But acrid was not a word that had been said in the place where there had been acrid laughing. Camouflage had been said. The place was a room on Earth. Imp Plus had stood there. But when he had said to the acrid laughter, “Stick to the point,” the word camouflage had not been one of the words that had made him speak.

Camouflage had been said in that room on Earth. But before. Not then.

Someone was to be persuaded by the camouflage.

Imp Plus was putting unknowns over unknowns; that was what this felt like.

He did not know what felt was like.

Someone was to be persuaded by the camouflage; someone had said so. In that room on Earth near the end of things it was not the laugher who was acrid. Imp Plus had said to that laugher, “Stick to the point”—had said in the same hard voice but at another point, “Do you mind.”

And this other point had been when that person in the pale green room on Earth had said camouflage.

He had used the word acrid in that room on Earth. And he had felt separate. Which was why this laughter broke out later when someone said, “You don’t want to go on forever, do you?”

Someone was to be persuaded by the camouflage. But not yet. Persuaded by false perigee, false velocity. It was not the someone who had precipitated acrid laughter by asking Imp Plus if his desire was to go on forever. Who was it who was to be persuaded?

It must be someone on a frequency. Hence later in orbit the frequency check Imp Plus had thought needless.

But Imp Plus was putting unknowns over unknowns.

The someone could be an alien monitor.

The shapes like birds and shadows were not only longer or larger or more; they were now more an answer.

Say they were the alien monitor. But they were inside here, and the letters TL had been transmitted from inside here.

The alien monitor would be outside. If the letters TL had never till now been transmitted at the end of the frequency, the alien monitor would know only the frequency, not the TL. So the TL which Imp Plus came up with would show Ground it was not getting the answer from an alien monitor which might have been manipulating.

What was manipulating?

But Imp Plus was the IMP PLUS of the transmissions, and the dim echo inside his head had said the letters TL which Imp Plus knew stood for Travel Light; and since he had no head, the dim echo with these extra words that had made Ground say O.K. could be the alien monitor, except the dim echo had felt familiar, and if it was not inside Imp Plus’s head because Imp Plus himself was not inside his head because he did not have a head, the echoing voice was still inside; and was it then more familiar to Ground than Imp Plus was?

For Ground did not feel familiar now.

Yet in darkness and in light Imp Plus had, he felt, been able to respond.

Which was different from seeing eyes in the green thing that were not there.

But Imp Plus had called it chlorella. Now that was something. If he was putting unknowns over unknowns, maybe he’d get less.

Even if it was not chlorella. Or more than chlorella.

It was not animal. It was vegetable.

It gave off oxygen.

Unlike the blind news vendor who would not be a vegetable.

And unlike Imp Plus, who gave CO_2, Imp Plus did not know how he did that. Others knew about giving CO_2, so why didn’t he?

CO_2, said the dim echo. But this did not answer the question Imp Plus saw he had had the desire to ask: namely, how did he himself give CO_2?

The dim echo went on, but now from Ground came the words IMP PLUS SAY AGAIN. WHAT ABOUT CO_2?

Something up ahead caved, and he heard its absence of sound coil the way he had seen the green thing and had felt the green thing an idea and called it chlorella. And Imp Plus felt he could now answer Ground only in his own way, and the dim echo was not speaking to Earth now: and a thing caved out which was not metal though a ball glinting in a socket, yet caved in, a filament bulging in a space. And this was why the still dimmer echo that now was even more here with Imp Plus was no longer speaking to Earth, though he did not know why. And when Imp Plus thought about himself, he found he did not see how he gave CO_2—though he had known. And he found also he did not know why the echo was trying different numbers and saying arrow this arrow that, and all Imp Plus saw was that there was less space inside, and the capsule was more full, yet there was more of everything also, and the arraying of letters and numbers high and low breathed (for the dim echo said) a bond or bonds between the dim echo and him.

An orbit of bonds.

But then, CO_2 IS BEAUTIFUL, Imp Plus said to Earth, and metabolism crackled back like a code or laughter, and Ground said, SUIT YOURSELF IMP PLUS, YOU ARE DEVELOPING A SENSE OF HUMOR. WHAT IS CORRELATION BETWEEN THIS AND GLUCOSE INCREASE?

But what was metabolism? What he recalled put a shadow over what he thought he saw. He did not recall metabolism. Did he see it?

But now the dim echo reviewed orbital period, apogee, perigee, velocity. And Imp Plus thought there was no more camouflage: velocity could not be increasing, for in synchronous orbit perigee was as nearly equal to apogee as ellipse permits.

More crackling came. Ground said, IMP PLUS HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

The crackling was acrid like camouflage. Arrows crackled from the dim echo. But arrows were only on a green space drawn partly white by an acrid hand. But crackling led by many lines which were now new holes to what now happened again: the caving in and out. This went faster to become silent, but the jets and the many sands of salt never fused no matter how fast, and Imp Plus did not himself have to tell anyone why, for the jets which were like strokes were not a pumping so much as an inclining so that he tilted in order to make a hill for the things to flow down or up. And, against the power outside, what was inside and was lately less was being pumped outside into what seemed more. And Imp Plus felt the caving in and out, and he thought because it burned it did not come through the protective window; then he felt the caving so much more that he felt other things. They moved within a wall not on the other side but in the wall. It was not one but many, while the things swarmed to get out or crackle it to pieces and were themselves pieces black and white. Or not black and white but other because of speeds at which pulses came from the fire-gold source of this light around or from the green chlorella itself or the green that was hard blue like the sea. For the voice that distant spring day on Earth just before it laughed its spiral up the spine that was not here now had cried, “Look at the colors of the sea.” For yes these pulses here now in orbit were color, yet depended on how Imp Plus inclined to see them. Pulses flying at you but never displaced. Yet pieces too. Or things beyond color. Too small to see but no less seen. He did not know you. Imp Plus desired the pieces but felt moved to name them first.

But the names came from the pale green rooms on Earth. He did not quite know those names. They might be camouflage, but they were not acrid laughter. Yet these names came some of them from the acrid laugher and not mainly in the large room where there was the acrid laughter and the acrid laugher’s words You don’t want to go on forever. The names came instead in a smaller room — our cell, he’d said — where the acrid laugher was only an acrid voice. And one of the names spoken by the acrid voice that now came as if Imp Plus himself should know it, was mitochondria. And two more were carbon dioxide.

But by now what had been damply nuzzling bumping to get out of that wall was not crackling any more. Though crackling was not really it. For there had been no sound.

What had tried to get out might as well have been the eyes that the green thing once had seemed to have.

But if Imp Plus had not exactly eyes and so could not have seen eyes in the green thing, this need not be why he knew now that the green thing hadn’t eyes after all.

I am Imp Plus, or a part, said Imp Plus.

He had been in another mode the word for which seemed unknown.

The cave-in came again dividing distance into more, so the cave-in was still further off from the dim echo busy with its arrangements. And this time the cave-in or cave-out had been a burst, an unknown cough individual in decay whose product was not hawked up to be gulped down, but instead the parts where the blast took place hadn’t been there before. As if after the smoke went, there they were. Or no, the smoke had come before the blast in reverse order.

But the smoke that cleared was not quite here. It was in a large pale green room on Earth where Imp Plus with reddening skin had said to acrid laughter Do you mind.

But if not here, then why had it cleared here? For it had cleared, and there were moving things in the chlorella which were not only chlorella; and the moving things spun and had names Imp Plus had prepared to recall but they didn’t matter except their sound of spin which Imp Plus desired Earth not to overhear and which he chose not to make even as a respiratory transmission to the dim echo right here which was saying to itself or to Imp Plus, “Chlorella contains photosynthetic cells, cells contain cytoplasm, cytoplasm contains chloroplasts which have membranes, membrane contains structure, structure contains chlorophyll.”

But the dim echo that Imp Plus felt part of him in the curve of what happened had said something that no more made these chloroplasts beat like glistening lids than had the acrid voice when it had shown Imp Plus the garden.

But here it was: green not as he had prepared or could have prepared to remember — not a dark beet-green or spinach-green or a dull jewel of buds called broccoli. And not a green that eyes in a late green room had seen. No, a green of its own breathing, its own breath.

If the cavings were a seeing, was that how he saw without eyes?

It could not be much.

And if Imp Plus had not known, with a desire like the windy flight of long-winged birds shearing the tips of the sea, that the dim echo was no real part of him but part of what Imp Plus was part of, he could have thought it the alien monitor or thought himself what the camouflage was meant to be an answer to.

Meant? Manipulated. Manipulated was the word. Said by a not-acrid voice in the pale green room on Earth. This had been a good voice. Not the acrid voice.

The acrid voice, to whom someone had said, “Say that again,” said near the end of things You don’t want to go on forever, do you? and had also said in a smaller pale green room, and not a full year before then, things similar to what came from the dim echo here now in orbit though with a feeling absent from the echo’s syllables and in words that now but even then caved out and in like some reach of Imp Plus. This reach seemed why he did now recall them, except he was the one who had said, “Say that again”—but whether in answer to the forever question or to these other things, he could not recall. Except that he had prepared to recall some of them but now not exactly these: cytoplasm (the acrid voice had said in the smaller room), cytoplasm you know about, and we are talking (said that acrid voice) about the cytoplasm of cells that are called eukaryotic cells, cells with an already well-formed kernel—nucleus to you (the voice had said — but meant what? — and Imp Plus had not known the tone of the voice except to feel he was stopped from asking, then stopped it seemed at times from listening: to words like mitochondria that had had to do with him but not so that he’d been led to respond while the acrid voice had gone on naming events in which, as the voice now said:) we need to see what happens between two kinds of organelles. The first are the structures which turn light into chemical energy—chloroplasts to you (said the voice with that sound of ill will so Imp Plus did not ask what organelle meant — yet he knew!). And the second kind are the structures in which enzyme systems help oxidize food then regain the resulting energy in the form of ATP, and are thus the cell’s power plants—mitochondria to you.

But why to Imp Plus?

For him it should be the other way around — power plants to Imp Plus. His supplemental briefing from the acrid voice built up in him a cold charge that was large, minus, and more than full. But the briefing then kept the charge from getting out into more than a single question he had wanted to ask so much that the walls of the smaller pale room on Earth had begun to move more in than out to increase his towering discomfort, and the charge got out only by jumping the room, let go by Imp Plus’s words I’m ill. Which was no news to the acrid voice.

Nor more new to Imp Plus than his own jumping words not quite a full year later, Do you mind: for these had been among the questions the cold acrid voice in the smaller room had inhibited in him, and if less to the point than the question What is an organelle? or What is oxidize? or What is the link between how enzymes inhibit and how they release? — the sudden Do you mind uttered by Imp Plus a year later in a larger pale green room amid acrid laughter had also been more to another point: and this point was nonetheless itself nothing like the project’s data on electrons shot by enzymes along a cell’s chain of respiration, or on the electron carriers called cytochromes, or concerning ordinary cytoplasm which the dim echo here now in orbit — how wholly far from the pale green rooms — reminded Imp Plus was the stuff outside the cell’s core. This an acrid voice on Earth cast on a screen to show lurking near the cell wall the alien ellipsoid — that known power plant the mitochondrion, which in great numbers must as a power plant have let off later the laughter which Imp Plus answered on impulse back there in a larger pale green room. Answered with a Do you mind shot at the acrid voice that had thrown up at him a supplemental mass of tobacco smoke. From this Imp Plus turned to a microscope on a table. He had guessed again the smoker’s feeling. It had preceded the emission of the smoke, but it held itself now behind the smoke. And Imp Plus had prepared to recall what the project controllers meant him to, but also something else he had thought: which was that the camouflage spoken of in this room, near the end of things — this camouflage that might be manipulated (one voice said) to persuade—might be used not on an alien monitor but on this unknown extra, this late addition to TL, namely Imp Plus.

But if that was what it meant, it was one more thing to try to remember, while always he tried not to think of the speed of light darting inside all of him decaying into holes he could not fill with any amount of desire if all his ill body could think about was lentil soup for lunch.

So to dispel the atmosphere of his own Do you mind, he had dispelled the burning smoke and said, “Well you can’t call me a hypochondriac.”

A non-acrid, or good, voice had said, “What are we going to call you?” and had coughed for a number of seconds, and it shook its head laughing like a friend so the coughing and laughing were one spiral, and said, “I don’t know about you but I’m giving it up.” So to lighten the atmosphere Imp Plus had said, “I’ve nothing left to give up.” To which the good voice that had stopped coughing had said, “You have a place — like Goddard.”

The great Goddard in a white coat. The Goddard who launched a liquid-fuel rocket from a handmade farm and kept it quiet for years.

But the acrid voice had said to the good voice, “Think how Goddard went.” Then the acrid voice had eyed Imp Plus, and when the good voice had coughed some more against the oxidizing cigarette and coughed also about the crab that had got caught in great Goddard’s throat, Imp Plus had acted to dispel the smoke in the pale green room and had said that if his place was not in the century like Goddard’s, it was then maybe a place in the decade like that of REP in his.

The self-shortened nickname of another great. And Imp Plus’s own words given off from a communicating room now how much later in orbit round the Earth came from an Imp Plus that Imp Plus could not place. But he placed REP. It was French, like the smoke—Row-bare, plus two more words. REP wanted to be first to get a plane off the ground. REP before War-’14 had foreseen atom-driven spaceships.

But this time the source of the French smoke — namely the acrid voice — had waved the smoke but not like a shearwater sweeping seafoam — toward Imp Plus. Who then had seen that the wave had meant to sweep it away. But no, the acrid voice had been coming through it then to extend to Imp Plus.

To extend a thing that now how much later in orbit the dim echo blocked: by transmitting data on REP: but to Imp Plus: namely that REP built a plane, wrote a book, said the word astronautics, thought up the control stick, almost completed a rocket to shoot instruments sixty miles high, typed letters in French on a machine, but in German wrote using what Imp Plus could not use any better than a control stick and so heard, in the dim echo’s transmission, as smoke: but saw, not heard: yet saw not smoke but the live thing that reached to Imp Plus through the smoke as if the breathing tobacco was smoke whose decay could carry more than carbon and burning. But then that thing through the smoke became a handmade fraction of itself, a false fraction which was a message to Imp Plus that followed from REP by means of data other than and now drowned by what came from the dim echo about the French satellite D-1A, or Diapason. And this data, first radiant, then gray, dimmed if it did not replace what had been missing from the live thing attached to the acrid voice that the acrid voice had extended toward Imp Plus through the camouflage: the data just about jammed that absence out with data on cells: cells to catch the Sun — Sun cells — cells in panels mounted in Diapason’s paddles that could be articulated to make best use of the Sun’s light.

“Four,” said now in orbit the dim echo, naming the number of Diapason’s paddles. But what was the dim echo?

And “Four,” Imp Plus had once said to supply that handmade fraction the acrid voice had withheld: withheld toward him through smoke. Yet now in faraway orbit Imp Plus had no use for the words said along with “Four.”

But he looked now through the absent digits—fingers, he knew fingers—four fingers snapped out of sight — and looked through the dispersals of smoke to the ill will transmitted in the face of the acrid voice. Imp Plus knew the word face. And seeing that unknown but present ill will, he remembered preparing to remember it. Which was no more the same as being briefed to remember, than oxygen was the same as oxidize.

And now at the same time, the division of known Four by known Four left them an unknown One which was not the Imp Plus being briefed in those pale green rooms on Earth and not the busy, informed dim echo here with him in orbit which seemed to know all that Imp Plus had used to know and so seemed even to have once been he. Oxygen was O.

Upending the operation whereby known Four paddles over known Four absent fingers yielded unknown One, Imp Plus felt all around him unknown cavings-out divided by unknown cavings-in to yield space now as spreading as what he’d now come to know he’d lost; as known as four French fingers lost in Row-bare E-P’s work with rocket fuel, familiar as Imp Plus’s own lost fingers and his words to the acrid face: “How do you know the four fingers REP lost were all on one hand?” and familiar as Imp Plus’s own hand and the long acrid hand that had come through smoke shifting its matter into swirls, come through by means of a circle of smoke that jogged the swirls and got flattened itself — the acrid hand came through as if to shake Imp Plus’s hand, only to turn then not into smoke’s acrid signal but an upright thumb’s crude sign knifing humorously upward to remind Imp Plus that he would lose spine, fingers, face and hands, ankles, elbows, neck flying off in radiations of centerless radii, knees, skull, mineral teeth, and don’t forget skin, no longer monitored as it used to be. Skin sensing in advance what the acrid laugher’s palm would feel like in the handshake that then had been withheld. Great Goddard’s terminal sore throat had happened, and Imp Plus had felt for it because in addition to fists and other parts he’d been scheduled to lose in the operation that must precede Operation TL, he would lose his throat.

But what he had been coming to was this: that while the body had been too ill to recover, the throat had not yet been ill. Nor made ill by the acrid voice’s smoke at the earlier briefing in May, nor at the conference less than a full year later in the larger pale green room when the acrid voice thought Imp Plus betrayed a secret hope that Operation TL would last — but the acrid face: this was what Imp Plus had now been coming to — dividing the unknown distances from known to known — to this: the thought that an orbit-decaying contingency plan could be used on him had been dimmed and replaced by the acrid face whose ill will he had thought he saw through the smoke: ill will that said, “Think what you’re going to lose: on behalf of Operation TL: think of it.”

From which Imp Plus had turned back to look down a lens because he could not stand to see the acrid voice. Yet saw only his own quickening decay. Yet now in the midst of Operation TL — in an orbit synchronous with Earth’s for this way Ground could hope to keep solely to itself its radio loop with Imp Plus — a chance fell out around him in new latticed gradients of brightness not like any gradient grid his old ill-briefings had readied him for, a force that came from the direction of the chlorella and the chloroplasts that he found himself comprehending — or seeing — and came from the unwrapping map of the Sun and, on his cabin wall, the birds and the shapes that cast them, but came as well from migrations of himself.

And this new memory received then with desire what had happened that late winter day in the absence of those four fingers snapped out of sight as if cut off at the knuckles of the acrid hand. Yes, the ill body of Imp Plus had been divided by that ill will, divided.

In the large green room that gave off carbon and carbon dioxide and that was not the green thing that gave oxygen, the good voice had said, “We have a casualty,” and had asked if Imp Plus was O.K. For he’d gone pale. For the blood he was soon to shed had slipped from his face. And its sudden drop (cause or effect of a towering headache) had made along the blood’s middle an opposite cascade — tissue of spindles, a logged current, to some place safe among the cells of what would remain when his remains were taken from him. He was so afraid of that that he thought only that he was breathing the acrid voice’s carbon dioxide, but what he feared was that he took the CO_2, but gave nothing back.

Yet spindles. Axis upon axis. Not wingless fuselages, and so much more than logs in a river, and not the first time or pale green room. But cascades shuttling from plasms to light too fast for ionizing words like chromosomes to yield fear for the things they named any more than for the one part of him that would be left when the words of the operation had subtracted him. Axis upon axis. Electromagnetic cascade. Parts broken down into fresh motion, not decayed dioxide — that was the idea. Or it itself. Or his desire or desired memory. Also fear. Of being a vegetable hawked as an Extra by the vendor who had taken hold. For Imp Plus would be news.

But he had been stranded between knowing. He had thought electromagnetic cascade. It was not wrong. And was so much more than logs in a river, but he had seen those logs in his thought like solids. But now that Earthly sight was dark years off and best so.

That sight as far off now as a spring day when he’d been touched — he couldn’t cast away the touch — by another laughter which moved up the grid of his back, and he had turned from the unhooded carburetor of a car that would not go and had seen first acres of sea crest skimmed by three broad-winged shearwaters.

And nearer had seen the light laughter and the mouth. And in order to save face started to say that the cause of the trouble was between the points and the carburetor. But the mouth was saying, “Forget the car,” and saying words that folded the soft laughter inward into words that said, “Glad I didn’t pack a bag.”

Something lay between those words and the next words. Was it CO_2 or was it Oxygen?

Whatever it was, it came not from the acrid mouth that blew the flattening ellipse, but another mouth — in words this other mouth did not know all the meaning of. And these next words were “Travel light.”

Between which the dim echo now must come transmitting correct velocities. But were they correct? And Imp Plus did not know if the transmission was to Ground or him. He seemed to be transmitting within himself. DIM ECHO. ACRID VOICE. GOOD VOICE.

He must heed the cavings-in, he must heed the cavings-out, and the shapes around whether they heeded him or not.

There was more all around, and the more all around was joining itself to Imp Plus.

4

But then Imp Plus had not prepared to remember he’d lost all those parts of the body. He had not had to prepare.

Then Operation TL had been upon him about to start. And instead of desired memory to help him into what might lie ahead, he’d been cast back into remembered desire.

The smell of those eyes at the seashore came only now when Earth was far away. The eyes above the parted mouth.

What brought them? The same mouth that had laughed a spiral up the grid of his spine, and turned him around.

The mouth had said the words. This mouth that Imp Plus had not prepared to remember had come between its own words dividing them. It came. And then it went into Imp Plus when he closed the eyes.

Which eyes?

Eyes he’d had.

For it had been with his own eyes that he had held the eyes that were not his and the mouth also, until those eyes blurred and weren’t there, and Imp Plus’s eyes shut and the other mouth was not really lost but found upon his. For he had had one too.

But whose was the mouth found upon his?

Her mouth. He’d not prepared to remember the mouth, or the word her. He leaned into all his own words. They were a lattice so deep they would not sound. For he had changed. He sank through their chances toward an unknown.

Imp Plus had prepared to remember that eyes arise out of a need for nourishment. Yet now instead he found that the eyes would nourish him. Found it in the odor of those eyes above her mouth. Sweet, for there had been sugar in the chambers of the eyes. Not loaded to shoot out at Imp Plus. Instead a slow movement inside. A slow flow over the guy-line fibers gripping the lens. That was it.

But it had been not now in orbit but then on Earth, with a body breaking into smaller pieces that got so small he thought about them being themselves not him. The thing was, he had thought this then on Earth but knew only now that he had. As if his unknown thought then on Earth had been the pieces themselves. Whose point was that they were to be later known. Pieces turning inside out. But it was now in orbit that Imp Plus saw what he saw. He saw into eyes that were not here and saw the sugar of their flow.

And sugar not so sweet as the flow itself seen along the northern rainbow slightly parted in front of the lens. He knew rainbow, but what he had prepared to recall was iris. A rainbow northern because blue. More blue but more distant than green. More green than the long wavelengths of blood Imp Plus saw were red.

And the waves of color were the pulsing of the rainbow. Closing it and opening it. And rings of muscle that were celled could change size. But here — or there — in eyes on Earth the rings had contracted to squeeze the parts of the rainbow toward each other across the pupil’s gap which grew small and the Earthly mouth said to Imp Plus, “Glad I didn’t pack a bag.”

He grew happy.

Imp Plus had not known mouth or her.

But that odor of sweetness from the eyes whose dots now opened again, as the rings relaxed and the rainbow parted and sweetness ran from chamber to vein sweeter than Ground’s or the Dim Echo’s glucose levels, was a mealy infant smell like the breath of the bird that had tipped out of a nest and been fed with an eyedropper.

“You can go just so far with glucose levels,” Imp Plus thought, and Ground came back, NEGATIVE IMP PLUS NEGATIVE. GLUCOSE LEVELS HIGH AND YOU’LL GO FAR. HOW DO THEY READ UP THERE, IMP PLUS?

The Dim Echo read glucose back to Ground: Imp Plus let it happen. Glucose was not just high. It was so high that Ground asked for another reading. Glucose seemed so much the reverse of low that maybe the gauge print-out was in error.

Imp Plus let the Dim Echo go and when it was gone felt like a touch what this Dim Echo was to him.

Imp Plus was seeing more of the green thing. Seeing more than that it had eyes. And he had been seeing these turns of shape in the green thing without having to name them as you name the ocean that contains a spacecraft’s recovery area. Imp Plus remembered having prepared to remember that eyes came from a need for nourishment. But he had not prepared to remember the cell’s power plants, so called by the Acrid Voice which added, “Mitochondria to you,” as mitochondria would be more clear to Imp Plus than power plants. And Imp Plus had not prepared to remember, yet now couldn’t help remembering, the Go-Between of the High-Energy Bond-World, words of the Acrid Voice, which added, “ATP to you,” as if Imp Plus would know.

In these reversals the Acrid Voice’s ill will had grown like an elastic breath of protective coating Imp Plus couldn’t get through. The ill will persisted like the shape of his blood after being let into a clear sac. Imp Plus found many words he knew.

“Better bone up,” the Acrid Voice had said.

But Imp Plus had had to know a lot for Operation TL, and he had prepared so much else that those reversals could no more command him than what the Acrid Voice had said to the Good Voice in the larger green room at the end of things. The Good Voice had told of the semiautomatic nature of Contingency Camouflage, how it defended against an alien monitor. The Good Voice had added, with that signal concern kept for Imp Plus, that Imp Plus of course would have more than enough to monitor without being responsible for Contingency Camouflage as well.

The Acrid Voice said, “After those mechanics get through with him, what will he have left to monitor?”

No hands, no elbows, no instep, no neck, no tail, no spleen, sweat, pancreas, nor amid the cells of the pancreas those ductless insulin-creating Islets of Langerhans. And would there be no blind spot where retina gives optic nerve entry or exit or a living chance?

What then would Imp Plus do?

Monitor an echo. An echo that went on communicating knowns by knowns. For here again was the Dim Echo reporting synchronized cultures not now synchronized, reading down to Ground figures to match Ground’s. Readings for nitrogen reaction in the nutrient test and for the lively swing of glucose levels. Dilatometer — he knew dilate—readings for liquid expansion. Galvanometer readings for activity in chlorella populations and in the cortical surface.

Ground said to say again how low glucose had gone before rising to a new but short-lived high. Ground said to check chlorella cultures again, they should still be synchronized. Ground said, SAY AGAIN PLEASE TRANSMISSION TOO FAST TOO DIM HARD TO TELL WHICH, and the dim but near Dim Echo went on so with the glucose ups and downs that the Dim Echo did not hear Ground’s request to go slower.

But when Imp Plus heard Ground now report electrical activity in prefrontal areas 9 and 12, then come between its own areas to ask if in the prefrontal lobe the Dim Echo (here called IMP PLUS) was giving back some of the kicks it had been getting from Ground in the temporal lobe — and by the way, said Ground, what pleasure did he feel in 9 and 12 right now? — Imp Plus did not have to hear out the Dim Echo’s unfolding reply about like patterns of activity surfacing—50 % pleasure, 50 % not — lobe-source sensors now hard to tell apart.

For Imp Plus found in all the folds whose fibers gripped each lens of those eyes he had held with his own lost eyes a sweet humor of sugar and blood which unfolding flowed over him.

It was a fluid ground laid down upon furrows, fissures, ridges, rolls.

It flowed over Imp Plus’s body, except he had no body now. Flowed onto folds that were his as surely as one of them now parted to make him glimpse what he had not known he wanted to see.

And this thing he saw was hers. Or must be hers, because the nourishing smell was that smell from her eyes. That slow serum mulled of sweet color and grains or globes of infant meal.

But then the smell faded as if turned down by an alien pulse at a distance. Yet the smell went like a trace that will come back. And what Imp Plus saw was a fine tangle of light veined against a fine darkness. Veins fixed as a map but everywhere winking.

This too was fading, but by increase: that is, blurring brighter and brighter. Like the light Imp Plus had wished for during a dark cycle where there was no good Sun. The bright blur was from the tangle of light and was one of the veins and he was closing fast on it like one of the smaller and smaller pieces his lost body had divided into as if in order to privately weigh itself.

Imp Plus went in. He passed through the brightness. And the Dim Echo was heard to have long finished responding that these nerves in the iris of that eye stood out upon their dark membrane because of the transmitter substance noradrenalin fluorescing in the neurons.

But the dark into which Imp Plus went through the vein of bright blur could not be her dark. True, the field of aqueous humor had been hers. For it came from folds where fibers guyed the lenses of her eyes. It flowed and singled out and filled and opened the new fold among the fissures and ridges. But like the fissures and ridges and cols and rolls that were his, this new fold was also his. It was part of all that the serum of sweet particles had spread its field upon.

Which was body. And was his. Yet not his body. Most of which was gone. And so could not react.

The smell of her eyes at the seashore was gone now too and gone the trace net of iris nerve light through which Imp Plus had passed into a dark he now heard caving toward him.

A dark which was his, he knew.

Because in what was his.

Which was one fold of many folds, many cols, clefts, fissures.

The dark was his because it was breaking. It caved and broke into parts he found he had wanted. But here was a breakage so great his cells for hearing it broke too; and his cells for seeing it were eyes jammed into sockets till the sacs split and aqueous humor spilled; so the eyes would stay sunk, which was what happened in a thing he now knew he had prepared not to remember but remembered just the same though not the word for it. It was like a thing he had been feeling that was here too. It he could not get the word for either. He knew only that it asked. Beyond this thing he had been feeling, he found out what was in turn beyond the words for what he did find. The cells for hearing and seeing the breaking were other than the breaking itself. The breakage was as soft as glue. A gluey unit lapsing into many units of sponge which then became many, many more and then became glue units, again. But ten to one it was glue. Ten glue to one gray. But the glue should be white, and this was darker. And there was a deep crackling unheard as if forestalled.

He wanted the word for the thing he’d been feeling: the word that was more a question. He wanted to stop, please. But now found that upon the dark he himself could place and place again what had faded or been turned off: the sweet smell and the nerves full of light. So there they were again, recalled here. He thought it was a thing he could do, and without words. Which was not the other thing that he’d felt and that was a word that was more a question.

But now from the center out the breaking dark was breaking up.

Into more and more corners, but reversed to point in at the growing center from which all the corners slid away like a star of darkness turned outside in, in angles. And the parting dark took away with it the iris nerve nets he had made reappear, and took away the sweet smell of her eyes at the shore.

Since he could not stop, and could not stop wanting, and could not place the word for the thing he had felt here which made him want to stop, he wanted then to be not here. But what caved up out of the cracked dark was also here, though of distances that divided into more and more and smaller and smaller distances. So seeing inside the fold that was his because it was part of what was his, he was also seeing into the green and blue-green beds of luminous bright algae, bright too because wet. Seeing more the green than the blue-green. Though he found more of both.

More than what?

More than before.

He saw more of the green but now also saw lesser things in the more. He saw spheres as small and separated as the wink of the eye, and they were in motion and in many motions. The less small of these spheres breathed faster, the more small so slow the other motions inside these spheres were clearer. The green spheres were chlorella, because he had prepared to recall chlorella. But now there was some more while he looked, as if some members of the green population had been huddled out of sight and now stood up pushing others aside.

It kept happening.

But the bigger the chlorella population got, the more Imp Plus could divide it on sight and so Imp Plus’s vision was finding the smaller and smaller.

And the smaller things that he saw in each sphere of chlorella were discs or eggs flattened and, more important, inclined so as they moved around the cell their edges caught the light. Imp Plus could tell this because the brightness which was everywhere, even in the shadows along the walls which were the walls of the capsule even more than of the fold, was not one but many running in individual packets so small they had more light than shape, and the discs and eggs turned their edges to receive these packs of light.

The discs and eggs were just green till Imp Plus looked at the still more small packs of light flown in to hit the discs and eggs, and then the discs and eggs were also as orange as the inner flesh of raw carrot slice and as yellow as what he did not recall but at once all green, and he could see the orange and yellow or not see it.

Which Imp Plus thought was a thing he could do.

He called back the sweet odor of the eyes and with it the map of nerve light. But he knew that whatever he could do, he could never do what had been done.

Here, that is.

That is, to fit into one of his folds not only the beds of green chlorella and blue-green anabaena algae, but as well what could be seen deep through the slick ball of membrane that had made the darkness part before it. For what could be seen far down through the great membrane past bends that Imp Plus could never have seen around with eyes yet saw around by some bending force that drew him to what he knew he would want, was a slowly waving matter of layers. There were six — and pale bonds like wires that had been softened into fibers came down from the wall of the path to join the layers. But through these six layers Imp Plus found his vision divided like a substance that needed holes to pass through a block; and way below the six layers, a radiance went like distance, and most near its spread were packed fibers arched radiating — sweeping then toward a far place where memory promised maps of bark and maps of space that were all one map of motion — a place, though, that memory said was too far for him to want or be.

Below that a yellow area spread with a power he saw had once flowed across his car. Think of what this one fold held, then; think how far he had come. But he could not breathe. He was drawn where he did not know how to think to breathe. He wanted to be severed from here; and wondering if he could be, he found again the bad thing whose word he did not recall except as a question and now he found he did not know question.

He saw divided light back along the path. He had come from his fold into a path that went many ways. Up there the cave got big, and the walls and overhead were cut into like a step. Downward — or, at least, the other way — toward the six layers, there was less light. But he now saw the overhead and walls pulsing to press the long cave outward to make its space more.

This pulsing came from what was not the walls and the overhead, but on them: glossy, taut fibers. These were what at the end down by the six layers reached off the shoulders of the long cave to plug into the layers, for Imp Plus was looking both directions. He traced the fibers downward to the layers that were blinking into the points where the fibers arrived.

But Imp Plus was reacting, he was wanting to be not here: for something would happen to him that must not, but the word would not come with its question which might not help anyhow, and the fibers pulsed inward as if they too, though plugged below to the layers, wanted to get out.

Out of what? His fold? Out of what was body and, like the darkness that got thrust off by the grand, glistening membrane, was his?

Was body; was his; but not his body, yet seen by sight that seemed the cells seeing themselves, which took him back where he would not go, the body of smaller and smaller pieces thinking themselves.

He could not yet go beyond those layers below to the radiant areas arching away into red and violet double distance. But he could be in many places, and he knew this better than he knew the red and violet down there with their alien promise of green if Imp Plus looked away fast and then back at them. Yet he found a wonderful blind spot. It was in his new chance to be more than one place at once. Lower along this optic tract an intersection led to the layers; he saw (then saw no more except to recall) not one body but two of layers down there. They were tied point for point like a charted code to fibers coming down the tract. He had to go back somewhere and draw this map so others could follow it. The brief sight of it was like a blink with a different eye, if Imp Plus had had eyes, and from this sight he saw that while he could be and see two or more places at once, he might get a blind spot if he contemplated two separate places that happened to be just the same.

But no, when he looked back upward now from this crossing which he now saw was colorless unlike the pale olive fibers, he saw two tracts not one. The tracts were the same, with a bright hole at the end of each and beyond the hole colors of the Sun that filled the glistening green and blue-green of the algae beds; and these were visible at a distance other than the close range at which Imp Plus had maintained the chlorella and anabaena right here in this one of many folds, though not at this point of crossing whose discoloration had made him see that the rest of the fibers were palest olive.

The fold was his. The wound fibers lined this reach of it, or tract that the fold led out into. Or the fibers clung to the sides and the overhead. Yet from the crossing upward were two tracts of fibers. With a hole at the end, and each tract had been cut before the hole. The fibers pulsed. The cave did not get bigger. The shadows of tucks appeared, and some part of the fibers was prodding through at right angles to the cave or tract wall: some part of the fiber substance moved away in spurts or sprouts.

The fibers breathed or pulsed: they fidgeted like animals asleep; but the fibers worked; but sideways through points along their length, like the overhead sprinklers in the green room on Earth. And Imp Plus did not want to be here, and he smelled the odor of sweet eyes and followed the smell of aqueous humor to where the fibers had been cut just at the entrance or exit through the hole, or two holes from two tracts. But the odor of the eyes increased what he felt, this thing the word for which was a question but he had lost the question but he knew the word now and it did not help except to make him move against the packed, breathing fibers, each a bundle of fibers, and get where their sideways tendrils inclined toward being.

A block of light blasted him. It gulped around him closing him. It made him a new nerve past breathing.

But the neurobody that had blasted him was not just outside him. He was banging and bursting into himself; the word was pain, and the question whatever it was was lost like that tree — a tree elsewhere — whose absence encouraged moss to grow on it. A pain that twisted the blood, twisted it around the sugar if that was what gave the flow a sweetness like what had been folded in the chambers of her eyes, for that aqueous humor his memory had smelled the forms of with a magnified attention never possible on Earth was so like the smell of fluid somewhere near here he could almost himself have made the fluid out of desire. Which was not the pain. It was a pain that was terrible. He knew terrible. It was a word. The neuroblast about him had made him one, and it swelled and split. But the division had come from his want. And the discovery of this turned out to be a division itself. Neuroblasts happened but they were also things, and came out of distances and skipped along cells and stopped or did not stop. And then he knew something else in the pain of moving at so many points: he thought this was sticky, sloppy thought: and the Dim Voice spoke so close that the Dim Voice was in Imp Plus, saying, “Severed optic nerve inoperative has receded into wall of optic tract.”

But a word from Ground was too dim to jam out the shore. There were the shearwaters, an empty-mouthed osprey about to dive, and the eyes of her who had touched him with laughter on his blind side and turned him and had spoken and placed an open-eyed tongue between words she said dividing them — between “Glad I didn’t pack a bag” and then subsequently so low and mild that a seabird’s cry and the osprey’s sharp dive contained her words, “Travel light.” And he had knelt, knelt was like an elbow, knelt below her eyes and mouth, distant from them. And had done a thing which he could now get pain to forget for him.

For all the points of these optic fibers were blindly sprouting sideways outward in his pain. But pain that did not kill and was all he had but made him more.

What he was in might well be not other than he.

Even if he had lost his body.

Imp Plus thought he would not stop pain by being someplace else, or wanting to be. But he would react. And reach toward whatever he would want.

He was in a motion of other sizes; he saw he had wanted them. On one hand, he passed through a silent white glue, or numberless glues. And each let out tongues onto stems that had long roots and short feelers, and the stems sent off and got many glints of bond to or from other stems. Yet at the places where the glue cells tongued onto the stems, there were not these sparking glints. Instead a fine sheath of spiral layers. The sheath absent in places where Imp Plus could see into the stem. And inside the stem floated shapes he knew. They were baked-potato shapes, or ellipsoids with two skins, a smooth one and an inner skin or membrane with ingrown tufts and puckers and folds and therefore much more surface area. And he waited for the Dim Echo to specify something, for the Dim Echo was present.

Sizes passed him, coming and going. Yet he did not just stay while they went. And they did not seem his.

Imp Plus moved in those sizes. He flew through stems where nothing happened, no sparks at the feelers, spines, and twigs, no glints spurting off roots. Impelled to speak he watched instead a capacity increase. Capacity for speech. In these stems or him. Capacity for silence which was a solution in which these growing stems as if breathing in but then not out divided.

Imp Plus was moving out but through a new fold.

He could not see himself but knew the fold’s crease widened, saw the brightness and knew he had never stopped seeing it.

He was seeing the hide and fur of the Sun even before he was out onto the outside.

But on the outside through the looser waters like the sweet humor round the rainbow in her eyes, Imp Plus was still held back in the glue cells below and inside. For these were not only a sea for the stems; these glue cells did something.

If Imp Plus let them.

Yet they did not seem always his.

“It may be up to you,” a voice in the large green room on Earth had said. “There’s action in every reaction, don’t forget.”

Well, if Imp Plus let the glue cells drag him back into their slow adhesive, then he wanted to.

He was outside in the light where the Sun drew from the plant-nutrient test-beds a shivering inhale. But he was held at one end of himself inside among the stems. Both those that fired and those that were quiet. Inside also among the soft impeding other things, the glue cells.

But only if he let himself.

For though impeding, they were not so sticky as they had seemed. They floated and nursed the branchlets and tendrils and shoots and strings of their neighbor cells.

Imp Plus stared through the tendrils, shoots, hairs of the neighbor stem cells, and the motion of his gaze stirred dim strands in the corners of all his eyes, strands stirred he thought by sight, strands loosening and tightening, strands of resilience — and his gaze also stirred sound among the hairs as if he caused some to twitch with fire but the sound was not of her speech, for among some of these stems and glues there was only the capacity for speech; the sound was of a wind like the rays of the seashore Sun swinging grains of salt water out onto the air and sand. And seeing as not before that in the moment of his passing through this sphere to the outside and then — as if he were the map — being drawn back by a part of himself impeded by the smooth glue cells, some of these had spread, he then found his own Earthly speech and was telling her her hair was dry, stop shaking it, it gave him a headache; and the laughter spiralling like ribs all the way up not his blind side but his open front he found to be not her laughter but his. And looking close again at the glues or gels, he saw these cells flash.

As if, through Imp Plus reaching down from outside to inside, the Sun had flared down through the fold. He had known down but he thought he did not know it now.

The flash lit up a new flow. Gold fiber loosened or dissolved, and once more in the corners of all his eyes he thought he saw the strands of resilience loosening and tightening but did not know what they were. The glue cells were again a cushioning sea of white but there were more of them, this was the thing, and looser in themselves so the neighbor stems leaned into the bland gel like a finger into flesh.

He did not say when but wished to and would. But slipping back up the fold, he looked at the masses of stems and more at the white sea cells so much more numerous, and now saw one thing come before the other.

The flashes came from some but not all of the stems. From the hairy or twig ends. And each flash swelled and thinned and dispersed a glue cell, and then — so that Imp Plus thought his being outside and inside had hit him with an impedance of double vision, for a glue cell breathed in and breathed out at the very same time, and did so with a blast that recalled Imp Plus to Earth and the Earth word pain and with a blast that sent waves of decrease up Imp Plus and to the outside to make the bright shadows on the capsule bulkheads turn and stretch so he again saw high, crying shearwaters eyeing now the skin of two bare upright forms on the beach — what the flash from the stem end had started in the glue cell opened there a cleft which had unfolded but unfolded a division.

So that the smaller green room on Earth and the larger green room were at first further apart. Then they were present, there was more of them. Which crammed them and made them communicating rooms.

“You are entering on a new life,” the Good Voice had said pointing to a green wall with white fissures drawn on it that spread now into particles of seashell, which Imp Plus could not have known had not the Dim Echo known what the seashells were made of — but which Imp Plus could not himself have seen, he felt, like the other new things he had sensed or seen down in the folds and tracts without a thing that was happening to him. Happening where? In the corners of all his eyes? the loosening and tightening strands?

And whether by glue or its dissolving, the green rooms recalled became more. He remembered hearing the Acrid Voice say, “No telling what the Sun will do up there, no telling; so don’t listen to all they tell you next door.” Remembered hearing this but thinking that far off in another place on Earth the blind news vendor might have something; for he said to Imp Plus, “I could have been a vegetable but I took hold; my liver’s good; I made up for what I lost; I think I see shadows sometimes, know what I mean; but what it is, it’s all over, that’s what I feel and so that’s what I decided.”

The green chlorella and the blue-green anabaena had not been in the fold, he had only thought them there. They were out here. Yet he saw the folds there, the one he had passed in, borne by her aqueous humor that had become his, and the one he had passed out. And in between the folds, Imp Plus saw where, as the Dim Echo had said or if not should have said, each optic nerve had been cut, and each hole at the head of the tract was that disc of nothing, the blind spot. The glue drew him to her. He had said he had no blind spot, and she had laughed but like the Acrid Voice, and then she had not laughed, but then had done a thing to him that he then could not take hold of in his remembering.

But now he had no blind spot, no question.

Because he had no socket for an eye to be in to have a retina. No blind spot to monitor therefore.

He had not enough to do. Was that it? So Ground had given him these small things to see. But some were not here in orbit. They were on Earth.

Ground had been saying, REPEAT COME IN IMP PLUS. COME IN COME IN.

The transmission cut across a length Imp Plus now saw was his. And from a point on this length the Dim Echo rose like a need for nourishment: READ YOU, GROUND.

CAP COM TO IMP PLUS. WE WERE ABOUT TO SEND A REPAIRMAN.

Imp Plus could feel the Dim Echo like a held breath that is spread, dispersed, and absorbed, but never let out. The Dim Voice said, IMP PLUS TO GROUND. ACTIVITY IN OPTIC TRACT. (But then Imp Plus found he had withheld the Dim Echo’s next words, which were Discoloration at optic chiasma.)

That was the crossing where the pale olive of the fibers had faded to no color; the Dim Echo had stored the word chiasma, and Imp Plus had prepared to remember optic chiasma, where the eye nerves cross.

He tried to think why, but what he saw was that the Dim Echo was of him while also between him and Ground. What crosses crosses from one side to the other. So there were sides.

IMP PLUS YOU ARE IN ERROR, Ground was saying to the Dim Echo. NO MONITOR IN OPTIC TRACT. MAYBE YOU MEAN ALGAE READINGS OR IS IT DILATOMETER, IMP PLUS?

Imp Plus stretched to see the shadows on the capsule walls move larger.

Ground said: IMP PLUS WE WANT TO GO BACK WHERE WE WERE WHEN YOU REPORTED LOBE SOURCES OF PLEASURE AND OTHER REACTIONS HARD TO TELL APART. WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN THEN AND NOW IMP PLUS? LONG TIME NO HEAR.

Imp Plus stretched. The pain itself stretched, and this was a decay like breath breathed in but never out. But could he be reaching and stretching to see the shadows? The shadows happened at the same time as he stretched.

Ground said where and when together. Thirst got rusty. The decay cracked. It was more and much more than a reaction other than pleasure. Imp Plus saw the shadows move a little larger, a very little that was as small as what he had seen when he had been down through the folds where Ground had now said on the contrary no monitor was.

IMP PLUS WE READ OTHER THAN BUT AFTER THAT WE DO NOT READ. SAY AGAIN.

The shadows grew larger but also nearer. This shadow growth was not after he stretched, and not before. When was it?

Ground said where and when together. They did not belong together. The shadows happened at the same time as the stretching burning pain, but not in the same place. The larger shadows were of the larger pain. The pain did not get exactly worse; it was larger, it held more. The Acrid Voice and the blind news vendor with years of bad teeth were both on Earth but not together. Why had Imp Plus not thought of that? The answer was, he had; but he had stopped thinking of it.

When?

Pain did not give up the answer. The vendor sold today’s papers with yesterday’s news. The pain was other than the stretching, burning pain that went on crackling. The blind man said, “I could have been a vegetable, a head of cabbage rotting on the ground living off my disability.” He grinned wet like an animal awake and bit then into some nourishment he had manipulated from behind the layers of papers, and maybe he didn’t mind his gapped teeth brown, yellow, black, blue, gray, green, hard enamel cream, because he could not see them. This was at an earlier time that was a very different time from when the Acrid Voice had drawn figures on a framed green wall of slate that told what did, would, but also could, go on in the algae beds in orbit. For if there would be no bent knees, no hungry neck, and no perspiring pancreas to monitor, there were still chlorella and other reactions; and Maybe, said the Acrid Voice — coughing so hard it caved out and groaned in—maybe you’ll turn green.

Imp Plus felt the terrible stretch was now between the blind bad teeth and the Acrid Voice, but was glad.

What was it he felt in between? The absence of what the Acrid Voice had said Imp Plus would not have left when those mechanics finished with him: spleen, liver, gland, heart.

What were they?

Ever seen, then or now?

Never, maybe. Yet then perhaps never any more than he had ever stopped monitoring them, there or not. But they didn’t seem ever to have been his own. He had not seen much even of his bones.

On Earth he had thought of stalks. His insides caved out, they cracked like bone strands. He saw her laugh and he had to want the pain if he wanted to see. He came so close to her laugh it became absorbed in her face which he lost; and in the cracking of new very small parts he found what had come between her two sets of words, and at first it was a like sound and a word and the word was kiss but then a wordless gap where flesh and even bone met and moved like making words. The association took him unforeseen. As if he were an object astounded by brightness.

“No telling what the Sun will do up there,” the Good or not-Acrid Voice had said. “It may be up to you.”

But at a later time and in the smaller green room on Earth, “No telling what the Sun will do up there” were words said by the Acrid Voice, “don’t listen to all they say next door.” So now, unforeseen, the ill will that almost a year before the operational launch Imp Plus had smelt in the Acrid Voice’s smoke winding into the folds of Imp Plus’s sinuses so that he did not wait for the Acrid Voice to answer his “Say that again” but instead had burst out, “I’m ill”—the ill will by which yes Imp Plus had known his ill body was being divided as if in one of those chalk figures on the green slate, this ill will instead seemed aimed at the next room and the Good Voice; and as in the moment here when he’d said, “I’m ill,” Imp Plus felt drawn into some reach of his own not the Acrid Voice’s ill will through a mutual torque.

Under the pale, northern California sun the Good Voice would say, “Let’s face it, there’s power up there waiting to be milked.”

So Imp Plus prepared to remember what the Acrid Voice taught.

But through the chalk figures Imp Plus saw things he also prepared to remember. Hungry stalks with headlamps climbing dark bends to forked crossings. The danger of getting separated. The hide and thirsty fur and face of light — touched, attended, sheared, divided into life. More. He did not know face.

Remembering had once taken a turn for the worse. That was it, a turn for the worse. All but a fraction of something had stopped. Many lights and alternately many darks had divided him into an unknown without weight. Between gyrations of light and dark he had fallen into a hole and become little more than the Dim Echo whose words and knowns gave undivided attention to Ground’s frequency.

Then like a hole in the unknown that he had become, Imp Plus had wanted to recall what he had wanted. Face might be that hole. There had been a bad phase of dark, and down one of the dark cycles stored sugars had slid past him. He had not slept when told to sleep. Was there part that slept and he didn’t know? He had stuck up arms he did not have, like the thoughts of unwalking wounded, and pressed against the clear curved skull he did not have, until it lifted off; the cycle of light had come again, and with it the green thing that was now like an idea. And with all this the caving too — and the humor and the desire for the folds, for the eye paths, for the splitting, and the great wet membrane.

The splitting burn was now, then, a crystal gut yanked through his parts steadily. He had no skull. He knew this but could not think what he was doing. The fold he had just been in had opened as he came out and was now no longer a cleft; he felt he saw it from several views. What was several? Four, he first thought.

The Dim Echo reported a stretching. The sea lost some wrinkles and drew taut so high birds and deep fish could be seen in it. Imp Plus went round but went ahead or up or down and could not tell if this was good movement or was his own spiral laughter at the Dim Echo absorbed somewhere.

Ground was saying, GLUCOSE IN ERROR. IMP PLUS ARE YOU GETTING STRESS? The steady voice was a parent.

Imp Plus desired the Dim Echo not to answer.

Imp Plus had to do something.

Imp Plus looked.

COME IN IMP PLUS.

Two slivers had strayed within range. But what was his range? Imp Plus had not seen them come. They drifted. He could see through them. Each was crystal and silver. He did not know the slivers.

COME IN IMP PLUS.

Imp Plus looked beyond the strange slivers, looked for the shore, found it grain by grain hacked into moist facets by an ax of flesh. Grain upon grain visited salt by salt by waves of foam. He saw fingers in the water but then his own chlorella which the Acrid Voice had said was only seaweed. Imp Plus looked for the seashore and saw four long fingers softened by water, saw teethlike digits he knew were toes paddling by the fingers that were bigger in the water. And the underwater fingers went for the toes, which were also swelled by the water. But the toes moved on beyond the fingers and beyond what grew back from the fingers that were hers and what grew still further back deeper in the shallows of the sea. But he found not her but a sunny plasm as if about to dissolve. Undivided she was, but a blur of green and blue, orange and yellow and gold plasm, less there than his own chlorella beds were here winking under his eyeless sight here in orbit.

The beds had their golden glimmer too and a figure embedded in the glimmer. He had not seen the figure before. His pain was free to turn this way or that way. At a distance from the two slivers, a large, clear, tilted shell was adrift near the shadows on the bulkhead as if it had once been fastened. He knew what the shell was. It was a hemisphere.

Imp Plus looked for the seashore and her fingers, and the rest of her idling under water. He did not see the sunny plasm now. He saw the breathing algae and the clear, oblong cover fitted over them which reflected a golden thing he must face.

Lips of ridges, folds like flesh overflowing an armpit.

The whole curve of his limit.

But then more.

He saw this whole thing all around; that is, he saw it from several sides. And if he did not yet understand how he saw it from many sides, he knew that this thing he’d first seen reflected in the plastic housing over the algae was the fraction that was himself.

A motion hummed a wave through him. It was pain but not the caving. It was a pain that did not burn or break; it was a different pain, alien though once known. Toes under the water rubbed her in a place that was as soft as her skin was strong. Her head at his feet rolled back and the wet face did not speak, and the long mouth that had said, “Travel light” looked strained by its back-arched neck. He was touched, and their eyes were joined by a bond that was bodily. The wave of this once-known pain subsided into its axis of distance, and its hum dispersed into the webs and packets of warm Sun flying into the algae: for it was his own brain he was seeing reflected in the translucent housing over the algae. The thing he had thought about but never seen.

But then more. He saw himself from several sides; but more, his sight could be seen; he saw his seeing; that is, his sight took solid shape reaching to his brain. In corners appeared those strands he’d found before, strands of resilience loosening and tightening.

A shadow was not as far as the capsule wall. It did not reach the wall. It was not a shadow. He saw it from many sides, and when he thought just how many, he got more caving all around and he tried not to want to be someplace else. Far off he had tremors of the neuroblastings. He did not know what they were doing. But he did not need to know. He looked for the twined strands of resilience. He remembered chiasma because he had wanted to try to cross if at the last moment they divided him so his sides were cut off from one another. But look — he had more than two sides, and he went everywhere.

A vein of crimson glowed from the shadow that was not a shadow, then went to another place, and a new burn tore Imp Plus outward.

He looked in vain for the spiral twine of the strands, the strands of resilience coming apart then rushing back together again.

The caving pains went with the crimson glows.

And Imp Plus knew the more that was all around came from him.

5

But the two slivers.

Imp Plus did not think the slivers came from him; but before this thought, that chance had existed.

The slivers had drifted up before he had seen them. They hung near. But they could not have come out of the algae beds close by without passing through the oblong plastic that housed the beds. If the slivers were meant for him, he would have to see. The Good Voice had said, “It may be up to you.”

Imp Plus saw them, but now his sight toward them was not to be seen. That is, his sight of them was not to be seen moving toward them the way it moved toward the fraction that was himself. That is, it took no shape like the shapes of sight he could see reaching to his brain. Whereas between his sight and the slivers there was nothing except thin air.

And the slivers did not look like bits of those other sight shapes. His sight turned the slivers around so they gave off their gray-gold light. Through some vestige of pitch or yaw held tight now by different distances, the slivers leaned. But of themselves they did not move.

The slivers were so still they might belong.

They fit somewhere. There was no waste. Yet here were the slivers in the middle of the capsule as unsupported as a thing in orbit.

Imp Plus did not answer Ground.

The slivers were so small that at some angles their filament shine was more than they themselves. Yet they were not fractions, Imp Plus thought. Not like the tilted hemisphere adrift over near the bulkhead with a scrap dangling down.

But the equal slivers looked complete in themselves. Sheer pins. Clear needles. With lengthwise parallels of transparency inside each whole transparency.

In proportion long, in size the slivers were small. When he looked at them he could lose sight of everything else around him. So when he refocused on the rest around him, or then refocused on the slivers to see the silver points at each end, he got long tickles of ache, a polar axis trying to pivot in him.

Ground reported transmissions from numbered areas. But since Imp Plus had desired the Dim Echo not to answer, Imp Plus felt these new transmissions might be the spasms set off in him when he looked back and forth between the slivers and the rest around.

The spasms had length but were not long. This was true also of the crimson veins that glowed like light in caves briefly seen.

Now at one end of each sliver changes were piling in that were hard to see. Bird knees like grasshopper elbows riding in by the million folded up into a silver point on each sliver. Waves came.

There were other places to be.

Imp Plus was here.

Still, in the green and golden sunlight of the algae beds and their glassy cover, he found an idea that he was becoming someplace else.

For he saw this brain of himself from points and sides that were outside it. So for a second that stretched the burn of the cavings into the once-known other pain beyond burning that hummed waves along an axis of distance, he decided he was in a dream on Earth. He had dreamt it in several places before the start of Operation TL. He had dreamt he was looking at what was left; and when he tried to take in breath, he had no lung. But this dream had made the bare brain a lighted, scaleless specimen from a photo lens. While what he had here differed.

He fell toward his brain or away from it. This changed its size. He passed from spoke to spoke of his sight moving around the brain so it seemed to turn. And most of all it was open to floods of lumen, Sun streams of tracer nuggets each one so wholly precise it bent an additional, completing Sunlight along the flank of its intensity so overshadowingly more than intensity that it was dimension that might be frequency itself.

Ground did not ask for the differences; Ground did not ask if Imp Plus had stress. Ground requested readings, and Imp Plus let the Dim Echo answer. But the Dim Echo did not. And Imp Plus had to give the readings.

But what differences? Between the Earthly dream and what was here in orbit. Differences from more than dream.

Which were they?

Imp Plus informed himself. A flood of blinding quanta headed through the brain, yet stayed. This made the sea of glia cells shine into snow bedding the bursts of neuron fire, neurobodies firing forth thought that he saw but could only know was his. Imp Plus recalled flesh against a flashlight. And here in the brain’s four bellies the Sun flood bulged so the bellies touched and swelled their light into a single brimming, But beyond the ventricles — they were ventricles, the bellies — Imp Plus found in all the incandescence curls of clefts too and the sealed banks of canals like light laid upon the field of light. Saw them while now he saw further the fountain crown of optic radiations line by line. But below them, where Imp Plus on his prior trip had not been ready to go, he thought he saw where the Sun’s flood furled to a gland of flame.

Imp Plus was ready to see these insides containing the Sun’s flow. From outside his brain he looked into it through a gray-amber flesh, through glaring oxides of saffron cytoplasm, through platinum-fired sheaths of glue cells, even to the edge of that gold gland of flame. Layer on layer swarmed with those ovals the cell’s power plants each with its path of particles breathed through blood-blanched locks of enzyme. Imp Plus might as soon use for these baked-potato ovals the Dim Echo’s stored and pointless and (he saw) now fading word mitochondria, as smell through it an acrid ill will now merely remembered: or see an alien ellipsoid feeding an Earthly fire.

Yet not as soon, maybe. For the Earthly fire was far away. And a memory unprepared.

Yet a frequency that went on mixing its signal of scrub and thorns until the fibers of crackling campfire came apart and he heard the signal.

Or saw: for the Earthly fire was in the night and in Mexico, unlike the Sun stream running through the brain, and unlike crimson veins winking life into tails of shadow.

Or smelled: for the potato shapes that neither fed the faraway fire nor were fed, had smelled like that for years and years.

But as they blackened into the mouthing coals, they were seen through: for amid the long potato shape — potato? mitochondrion! — was a daylight window; and a small bird black-white-and-gray with a touch of red on its side and a forked tail three times its body swept over a line drooping between poles against the plateau of sky: so a voice could say words about the sac hanging from the dark line: it was a nest woven by the cousin of the scissor-tailed bird, and both birds were called flycatchers.

The words were out loud. The voice had wanted to take a breather from Operation TL, get away from California for a few days and nights. The voice was his, and it was talking. The car’s daylight window had moved, like the glove compartment with its books of California matches, into the nighttime campfire where not one but two potato shapes roasted.

For there was a second voice. It had not come from California. It did not laugh and was not the same that had lain in the water, and it was dry but not acrid. She had seen the scissor-tailed flycatcher from the car window. And now waited for her potato among the thorns and scrub of the tierras templadas. And this voice said this was good — oh she’d wanted to get away to the Sun.

But the Earth with the campfire had turned away from the Sun. And the voice across the fire with its eyes closed would go away, and Operation TL would not. So Imp Plus had leaned along the ground and moved around the fire. The voice, hers, was not speaking; it sang: he heard templado, not templadas and not tierras.

Imp Plus got to her. Except he was not yet Imp Plus. With the start of Operation TL he would no more be what he had been, and maybe this had been why he had been moving around the fire toward the voice that sang with eyes shut.

When she was done she opened them. He had been touching her blue jeans and she had been holding a silver flashlight that shone in the fire.

He had been thinking what would come and remembering what he was to become in four weeks. This thinking had been clear and it had been touched by desire; so it came to him now in orbit. But he could move from spoke to spoke of his sight around the radiant brain. For this was new, this was not remembering. Or the spokes were new. For they were his sight, each one a solid. Yet where their light was dimmer they could be seen through, and yet his sight was maybe not sure.

His sight, though, was solid. But was not only spokes.

More wings or necks.

He didn’t know where they came from, but he knew they went to the brain.

Knowing this he saw there in the brain a blue dart come like the crimson veins in the shadows before. This blue was a line and then a radius. But a radius become the locus of a width. Which was how it plowed sideways broadside. He knew locus.

The knowing and seeing of these things went or came with the tearing twist of pain. It twisted round tight but did not untwist. For instead it found in its tightening spiral new dimensions by which it then burst inward. And was the reverse of torn. A thick new membrane. He stepped back to view the cloudy silk of it which was close to him on the way to the brain along his solid but unsure sight.

But he had nothing with which to step.

Yet now he went right over the membrane along the spoke to the brain. Close up he saw the blue line that had plowed or washed sideways between a cavernous canal and an infinitesimal drag or suck that he did not see why he could see. But the wash sank in, and its dim trace faded against the Sun’s flood charging the brain.

Imp Plus passed without thought from one spoke to another; he would see if he could see the blue trace. But it was not there, and in that field of absence the other, once-known pain that was not the burning twisting caving came to him along its axis of distance.

There were shoes of yellow hide standing by the fire. They had marks on them that were a map of how to get back. In California a shoemaker’s axle had spun against a rim of sole, but the shoemaker was not making the shoe. Imp Plus took steps through the night in Mexico, he was following the voice and the flashlight that bobbed ahead of him. The voice was not singing or speaking, the sound she made broke between breathing and humming at once. He stepped on thorns which he did not see. The shoes were back at the fire. He cried out “Ow.” The light stopped bobbing and the beam wheeled, hitting the car which was at a distance elsewhere. The light passed a pale thing close to it, and then the beam came to him. The woman was not making the sound now. She said, “All I wanted was some sun.” He wanted to tell her about TL but she was afraid she had nothing to give back. The empty shoes of yellow hide were back by the fire near the baking potatoes. He wanted to lick a honey-sweetness but it was in himself. He was thirsty but for what was already in him. One desire filled the place of another; a thing tightened on him like shoes.

Feet came to him along the axle of the other pain that was not the crashing, caving pain, and was barely out loud. But then they were his own feet in daylight. Toes stroked a throat, and they went on under the California water to a mass with a nipplelike knob he squeezed. The toes under the Sun-drenched cloud of water were his. He was up to his shins and not in Mexico.

The toes that squeezed were under the water somewhere and under the basking woman. The bigger toe he knew had an oval hornlike plate set into its end. Next to it, a thinner longer toe had a small square plate. A long weekend was what he and the woman had ahead. Yet she was travelling light, she said, as if she knew something about Operation TL. Or was glad to have only themselves. Now she rested wafting face down in the shallows of the sea. He pinched, not tight. She rolled her head back out of water and said, “What you want.”

It was the face that rolled back. Did he know face? The pale thing the flashlight beam had passed in Mexico not four weeks before had also been a face. Another woman’s face. Pale and not California. Though when seen close up, wet like this. Though not so wet. Wept. Tear-damp.

But this woman half sunk in the Pacific sea let water run over the wide-set eyes of her turned-back head. They were blue where his were brown, he could see them. And her whites were clear blue-white.

His sight of her had come to him through the nipple fixed out of sight between his two toes. His sight of her had spiralled up to him. It had come through parts of him he was going to lose at the end of the long weekend and had begun to miss.

The sailing shearwaters and the flapping, crook-winged, hook-billed diver osprey had gone away into the open sea air. The woman had turned on her back.

He had seen swirls of foam and felt twists of ill will clouded in acrid smoke, and he had dragged a long breath in. So long he caught a film of spray and his front swelled out, and she said, “Vanity.” She laughed and the blue-green water tipped into her mouth and was her color. She coughed and sat up in the shallows and held him. Her breath woke a knee. Below her shoulder which was cool, her gentle gland turned outward pressed against his shin stem. Her armbone wet the back of his knees, and the end of her arm came around in front reaching up higher.

These good things came to him. And she coughed some more, and many gaps in his sudden and towering headache raced independently back and forth bringing the acrid camouflage of smoke — and when she got to her feet she rose up that axis of distance that was the once-known pain that was not the crab twist of cave-crash. What came to him out of the air and the distant glint of his car and of hard glassy particles in the sand of the dunes, were bodies of her nipples and then dark-blooded pores of her nipples and her whole face. And before he knew it he had followed the curve of her lower lip up over the sea-bright chap creases dried and cut in fine puffs, and in beyond the fleshy skin into the ingrown body the shining loin of the mouth saying the Sun was warm.

What had come to him then came now on a wing or spoke of his sight. And with it came the grinding crackle that turned him into a new blast-burnt hollow, and with it came the blue dart. And of all things the Dim Echo was saying, “Hypothalamus active.” The blue dart was this time so much into the brain that the blue line was right above the gland of flame he had stopped short of before. And so deep that the dart itself might have been what jabbed into him the caving rip of burn-pain. But Imp Plus knew that this time the pain was on the next spoke over. Where he saw he also was. Though this next spoke or neck of sight stood below and ran from another pole.

But what had come was this: that in the Sun of that spring seashore, he’d seen the ingrown body of her mouth: seen edges, tips, grooves, and arches of a tongue laid he only now saw with a velvet of cones or nipples small like light-receptor cells that did their own winking, each one: and here was the point, the point which had not hurt here except with the hum of distance but now with the other pain ground him and twisted him into an instant: the point was that he had looked into the mouth to find a formed emptiness that was the ingrown body and he had known he did not fear an unknown and brain-scrambling loss that would take place on an operating table the next week: and instead had had a new desire. There were words he had not prepared to remember for the point of the desire he now saw.

But the space of the desire that seashore afternoon on Earth had been he now saw as unknown as the tongue’s bed of velvet nipples had been to his eyes. The difference (and again pain came on the heels of the blue dart) was that here now in orbit the desire was a thing not lost. It was not the pale strip across the pores of her back and the groove of her spine, and it was not the fine smoke of rehydrated sweat from the armpit that far down his body his calf hairs had brushed while she sat in the sea and that had then gone up toward him along that axis of distance. No. What he understood now in orbit was that the desire’s aim had been unknown. And where his present microsight came to him by division upon division, this unknown desire that was in place of fear divided its long vacancy into the non-burning pain of waves that even then had always hummed an axis of distance.

And as the brain from several — how many? — spokes, wings, necks, or routes as if it had no scale — or, for that matter, thought of him — came at him and went back, came large and went back to less, he got the product of this multiple division.

The product was the other pain of the caving.

But as he got this product it changed.

For the blue discharge showed its dart at once and more than once not just in the spot the Dim Echo might have been calling hypothalamus right above the furled flame now still more tightly furled. This time the discharge of line or dart went on longer or stronger against the Sun’s flood.

But this was not the change. The change was that from the caving-out, the caving-in, the breakage like a stretch where cushions of blood shot into cords that twisted narrower and narrower into instants like quanta, there was no pain.

Though the pain was there. But held inside his knowing: and the knowing was that the caving blasts were a quotient got from dividing the old non-burning pain of distance by the desire-of-unknown-aim.

The car at the edge of the beach was the same that had gone from California to Mexico and back. It was not new but it had become an unknown quantity. This had caused the woman when she had been standing behind him to laugh a spiral up his spine. “Come swim,” she said, and then “your eyes are bloodshot.” He was going to leave the car behind, but not yet. They had to get from the beach to other places they were going. But at the end of the long weekend when the operation was to get under way, he would be glad to leave the car behind. But that was not what she laughed at. But if her words Travel light meant she knew of the project, then she might know he was leaving the car behind. But that would not have been what she would be laughing at. He knew her. But what did he know? The car was not new but the spokes were new. They did not have horny plates like toes. The spokes were several and he saw by all of them. The spoke of the cloudy membrane had moved, but so had another, but he could not tell if this other had moved down or up or out.

He had to change his thinking.

This thought restored the torn burn-pain, the tear of cave-crash. But so fast he didn’t spot the blue dart. For the Sun’s flood was now less. The gland of flame where he had not ventured had furled even more tight and thin.

But he remembered the launch. And that he was weightless now. Yet felt such a weight as he had not known.

Maybe it was the blind news vendor’s radar. The man had said, “I took hold, and now I got a regular radar.”

Imp Plus had said he felt the radar.

The blind man said, “I see more than you think.”

Imp Plus had asked him what was the more he saw with his radar. Imp Plus had felt the whole weight of the launch and had lost hold of a hold he had had whose presence he knew he had not then needed radar to name.

He had heard a dull gleam of metal clank into the funnel in front of a stack of newspapers. The funnel was tin, and what went into the tin was silver, his quarter but not dropped by him. “How much you give me?” said the blind vendor. “Somebody else put it in, right?”

“Right!” said another voice.

There had been more than Imp Plus there at the newsstand. There had been the other that the blind man had seen. Seen? Not out of his cold eye sockets covered by loose bandages. Imp Plus did not know right. But he knew the high voice. But then another voice had spoken different words hard to know, and tiempo was the word Imp Plus caught and remembered. This new voice was lower than the one that had cried, “Right,” and the blind news vendor was saying, “You got your kid with you.” And smacked his lips.

And Imp Plus saw not the lower voice that had said tiempo and moved on covered in fur, but the person round the Mexican fire and baked potatoes. For this was not California.

She was coming along the sidewalk, for this was not Mexico. Though Mexico had sidewalks though not around the campfire in the plateau. It was cold at the newsstand. As the person advanced, a smaller person went toward her which was away from Imp Plus and was like rising from the bottom of a scope to the top. The news vendor had said something in Mexican to the voice that had passed and now another voice that was also the news vendor said, “What’s your name? You like chewing gum?”

And Imp Plus now slid away from, then toward, the small then large crown, head, wig, vehicle of his own not scaleless yet now less heavily lighted brain. Leaned and staggered round the brain from spoke to neck to limblike stabilizer of what must be his solid sight which saw clefts, glints, craters, and full, pulsing flats potential in what were or had been clefts. But he couldn’t get off the chill axis of this distance-pain till the words came to him. Words once said to the blind news vendor: “She’s not here, she ran to meet her mother.”

For before seeing her rise from a low rim to the top of some scope of his, yes Imp Plus had been holding his child’s hand, his child. And while he had not yet been Imp Plus, he’d thought of being. For soon he had been back in California seeing crushed shells that had been remade into tubes, sticks, dowels of chalk draw angles that beamed like a flashlight right out to the curve of a flat ring. Beamed from one center on the Acrid Voice’s green blackboard. But the flat ring had two centers. And the second had the chill of space and the Acrid Voice called it empty. But from the first center he drew those angled segments that got wider and wider and like a searchlight beam hit the lip of the flat ring—ellipse, he knew ellipse — and that first center was the Sun, and the Acrid Voice was showing Imp Plus arcs of Earth’s orbit round the Sun.

And now as if from all four spokes of his solid sight — for several he found was four—Imp Plus found he saw like those white segment beams angled by the moving nest of the Acrid hand on a green slate. That is, saw with an equalness of spread down from the roof of that brain that he had half stopped thinking his, down down to the membranes along the solid limb of his sight right here close and toward him to the very brink of wherever on the four variously aimed limbs he looked from but then might see through in spots, for his sight was unsure. And he remembered dreaming his way through all the shapes and data on that slate, for it was a map to get back by. Yet instead he saw himself receding from his child, again his child running to meet her mother: to figure what hope had let go, he had to figure from the empty center of this ellipse: that is, see from the center unused by the Acrid Voice.

Until the Good Voice was telling at another time of the unknown force of solar light, the goodness of the project despite but also through its strange addition, telling also of the future and its goodness, while leading Imp Plus who was not yet Imp Plus out of the large pale green room on Earth though not to the smaller green room but to a place where he was to stretch out.

Which was what Imp Plus — with, behind him, birds, two women, potatoes, feet, and child — was doing now. Stretching out.

Else he could not have seen where a cleft now widened to show a silver pin like the points on the two floating slivers, and could not once more have gone into what he thought was his own brain. Looking for the crimson vein he found not crimson and not the shadows. He found what he then thought had made the shadows. He recalled the crease or cleft he’d half thought of, half hoped for. The Dim Echo was asking again to be laughed at. It reported 50 % increase in activity equally throughout Imp Plus which might include oscillation between hypothalamus and unknown areas. The Dim Echo reported capsule temperature lower.

Ground replied, WE HAVE BEEN GETTING THAT, IMP PLUS.

Imp Plus moved.

He spun round the four necks of his largely solid sight: and since at the same time he constantly opened and closed the brainward angle of his up-and-down scope, he made a spiral. Not the spiral of the blue-eyed woman’s laugh up his heavy spine that had turned him from his car engine; no, not that spiral but his own oscillating spiral. It was, first, all over. And a field more equal than that sweet humor of her blood and sugar laid once upon his ridges, his fissures. But what his spiral did now — though not with that polar spasm of refocusing like a funny-bone jab — was to spin in on a frontal crease which he’d half hoped half thought could get to be instead a crater or rich flat; and with the spiral’s contracted circuit but thus greater force, the spiral then stroked and spread that frontal crease, opened it much further.

A flash like a thought apart from him popped up.

It was a silver sliver. Like the slivers that hung in the light lowering near the algae. Crook-winged waves folded into it long distance. (The light was lowering everywhere.)

The sliver Imp Plus had popped out sailed on. It moved at a lean.

A figure shining through the heavens at an angle.

Proud filament launched by Imp Plus, its motion a long long breath drawn in.

Was why it moved why it kept moving?

“Vanity,” the woman said in the water. Lying there, she had not seen all he’d seen. But while she did not know his anger against the Acrid ill will much less the reach it had drawn him into by some mutual torque, she had seen his long deep breath swell him. It came in through his face. (He knew face.) She had said, “Vanity,” when he had taken in his deep breath; but he had also felt his face stretch and the flesh grow. (Vanity?) The growth was the mouth. He had made up his mind to smile — because he hurt again. (Where was the time going?) Particles of afternoon dune sand glinted closer.

One glassy facet a hundred meters from the car moved. It was somebody’s dark glasses. Imp Plus did not want the woman to know. (He wanted her the way she was.) Her figure folded and she leaned into his shadow. She sat up. Her breast pressed his shin stem. Her mouth came up. (Time went.) Sunlight passed in through his hair which was barely going gray; he did not do anything but stand inert; but not in vain, for in her slow rise up the axis of distance he too was in motion.

He said, “This morning”—but he wanted the quiet between her and him, so he stopped his words: though they had already launched his thought: it hung that morning between the smile of the Good Voice and the smile of the Acrid Voice. Imp Plus had been thinking between: that was it: thinking between these two: so it was thinking like a blindfold, thinking like an emptiness that didn’t exist all that much, an emptiness of attention: he wanted time off this last weekend but he camouflaged his wish (that was it) as the will to know: to know all that they in the pale green rooms could tell: about day and night, about glucose level, concentration loop, electrode monitors (“But so much is up to you,” the Good Voice beamed), G stress during launch, gyro rings in the inertial guidance system: “Ah, inertia,” said the Good big grin (knowing much that Imp Plus did not know); but the Acrid Voice said, “Inertia’s just self-preservation.” (His smile was short.) For the first time in a long time Imp Plus had not felt ill this morning. He wanted to get away from the green rooms and all the eyes full of wonder. Yet later at the beach he did not care if the eyes in the dark glasses saw.

If vanity was inertia, inertia might be vanity.

If inertia was self-preservation, self-preservation might be vanity.

“Vanity,” she said into his mouth.

But if it did not matter that the dark glasses saw him, it did not matter if he saw them.

Imp Plus’s approaching sliver slowed and hung. It did not keep moving like the light that lowered.

But as it stopped it made a length of shadow on the milky membrane below it. Imp Plus now saw the sliver’s true or longer length not from the shadow site above which the nearly vertical sliver, like the shadow, was little longer than a point; no, Imp Plus saw the true or longer length from another place as if the eye corners where he often saw the strands of resilience loosening and tightening looked back at him.

What would he do?

This was a question, but was it the right one?

One thing he could do he found by having done it.

This was to hear Ground’s transmissions as silence. Yet when and how weren’t sure.

Ground asked the meaning of This morning, but Imp Plus eyed the new sliver instead.

He saw the sliver’s longer length with a ray of brain behind it. Yet then at once he saw another still longer length from a new angle’s height so his view had for background an arc of capsule bulkhead and the cool shadowy end of one of the spokes on which now no crimson vein showed here and there. But this was not enough. A desire once part of him now acting alone for him brought one more view, small and not leaning at all and smaller than it really was because the view was cut into by a spoke whose length was unclear because of the angle of the view which seemed to be from the far and under side of the brain. Yet now this set of four views moved into one, with the pain of caving-out which was not as keen now though more painful than the other distance-pain that maybe did not hurt. And with the pain came a shimmer. It was a pulse and was a new brightness of haze and so less clear, yet a new size which was not bigger and not smaller. It was the whole sliver, the all-sided thing now milky-hazed, now crystal clear, but whole as a memory he could not put his finger on. He knew memory, but saw that it was not the same as remember.

But the new whole sliver was not now any one of the four co-views.

But was their sum. Their product. Their home. Their figure.

Here a pain worse than cave-crash skewered him on a cylinder he did not see. Cylinder and pain were an axis fine as a blade that being a locus was also the curve of cylinder wall. Pain so bad. Pain like splitting the speed of light where he was light, and it was silent — what? — and so bad it seemed final: but was not. And when it passed shivering back down its axis of distance, he remembered a shade of what he had remembered at the endless point of that pain: it was a light called coherent light banked, divided, remade, in a dark room not as far from the newsstand as were California and then Mexico. And he as he then had been had been in charge. Not the Good Voice planning. Or the Acrid Voice chalking. Not the brown woman with a gold ring who had brought a long sliver in to his arm when he was in pain. The pain had come so soon after the day at the shearwater beach that he could not understand how his body whose illness was a beginning of Operation TL could change so fast.

What could he do?

Hear words from Ground: THIS MORNING WHAT, IMP PLUS. YOU SAID THIS MORNING. THIS MORNING WHAT? COME IN IMP PLUS.

He (who was you) had the stretch-cave burn again all over and an idea that was not green came to him, that from the spoke-limbs his solid sight to the brain had found more than was being found from here in the brain outward. Here he looked from chance angles and corners. A fort so living you did not know where you would chance to see out of it next. The spoke-solids of pointless sight had wonderful colors of thickness. They moved away from him, he thought. Spines of membrane, spines fattening. He felt he saw in one and then another a budge. Like a thing inside. Had shoved another. But more came after. Or he thought he could see this, and thought he could be there in them more clearly than he could have them by looking from the brain and its configuring changes outward.

Ground asked a new question: Was he not remembering as much?

A wave felt like a collar going through him, and it left him less. And a voice that was the Dim Echo said, “Wonderful, wonderful. Say again.”

But the wave was a thought. A thought that everything would be taken away from him. A feel would be taken from his flesh as already flesh from feeling. A hand taken from his hand, a Mexican song retracted from his ear. A salmon-nippled tongue subtracted from the fork of his legs.

Ground asked if Imp Plus felt O.K.

Ground added: FRANKLY IMP PLUS WE ARE GETTING NOTHING FROM CERTAIN AREAS. ARE YOU INTEGRATING SENSORY INPUT?

Pale green ripples rose in the middle of a limb. He wondered if the Dim Echo was trying to speak.

But the ripple wasn’t quite a motion. More a gradient. A bony gradient that layover something but also was that something.

And was matched elsewhere on the outlying spoke by another gradient form as alive but this time darkest red. Which stretched like a mouth going to open.

The milky membrane was most slick and thick between these two areas.

Dark blue and pale brown were on the spoke or wing adjacent. (Or did he only remember?) And on it lay the long point or brief rung of shade cast down through the capsule’s empty space by the now more leaning sliver Imp Plus had sprung.

Rung. He did not know rung. But with its cast shadow, it was an idea. Yet not like the green thing, the algae.

Though, like the green thing, someone else’s idea. But rung or not, Imp Plus had had the feel of that shadow across his seeing before: and now knew he had already known that the membranes were what he saw with. Though not eyes.

Sometimes he saw through; sometimes not.

If the news vendor kept his mouth open because he saw with his teeth, maybe the colored and discolored and loose and also absent teeth came and went and came again.

Beyond the ripple districts the membrane tissue began to fade.

The limbs were not all membrane. Their sticky shine was sometimes hard as plating.

One of the spokes seemed to move away from him, he was not sure. What could he do? But the center district between the green and dark red ripples was now bigger.

He felt under the membranes levels and laminations that he was going to see, and he could feel right down to the vegetative and animal poles of one cell lucky enough to be part of what the membrane was becoming part of.

Vegetative was not the vendor’s vegetable. Imp Plus did not know animal, but only recalled it. What could he do?

“Remember to survive of course.” That was what the Acrid Voice had said into the chalky greenboard in a pale green room as if he did not mean the words to go to Imp Plus. But remember what?

The woman at the California beach was all flesh. She stood straight against him and he forgot his ill body. Forgot the Mexican thorn that had cut his feet (near the silver-leaf flower that sprang up under the flashlight) — and the fingers that went away from his hand at the winter newsstand in which the hooded vendor with always open half-laughing mouth and rotten teeth had a bandage so loose you could see in one socket a pale red purse like a body hole. All came together loosely arrayed by a force. It was there and touched Imp Plus who could feel it but not reach it.

It was like an idea, other ideas besides resilience: like the resilience the strands were of — the strands in corners of all eyes loosening and tightening, loosening and (now he thought with the full closeness of his former look) losing a process of strand before tightening back. The chlorella bed had seemed to him an idea long ago. But then he tried to stop himself, for he did not know idea. He had recalled it; but he did not know it. He knew the green chlorella, knew that it gave him part of his air. Wasn’t that all? And now also knew that the spokes had membranes with sight. But he persisted in feeling that the spread and the poles and the open chances of this sight were more than sight and more than what they’d felt like.

Here in Earth orbit he leaned out in all the axes of his spines to this force that had him but that he had not learned to touch. The force was dispersed in the outlying parts. It was like an idea if Imp Plus only knew idea. It was the idea of his sight. Or the force of place where sight grew. Or the chance of place which force inclined to find. He leaned down the one axis of distance. But then he could not. For he had seen how he had slipped toward a secret he would have from himself, a secret kick he would have from himself by recalling the woman’s moist touch all round him by the body he once had had but did not now have. This secret leaning had seen itself, brain and limbs merging in a mutual inclination of sight, or change of chance: so the first leaning was displaced by the second leaning: this second leaning was not one axial incline but a spread from one of several possible centers, and a spread of the caving-pain that made him laugh back and budge the four outlying limbs or necks bedded with membranes and their growth and with that underlying offer feeling its way through their plasm. Before, from outside, his brain had been, he now saw, small or then huge only because motion in his membrane-sight had made that so. And what he’d thought to be sight projected solid toward the luminous vessel of brain was really a solid that happened also to have sight. And the shifting look of the brain-stuff as he’d leaned round and round the brain, was real change in the brain’s face.

But what could he do? What of the light? It had lessened. It still wound into all the parts like smoke into sinus. But the light had lessened.

He did not know. But he felt a lip of fold unwind that he could only have seen had he put himself forth onto an outlying limb membrane. And he wished not to do that. For the lowering Sunlight still warm in flood gave him a feel that was not alone the Sun’s movement but his too. A feel of many mouths opening that had not been before.

Imp Plus had laughed into the smiling mouth that had said, “Vanity.”

For he had seen through the glinting peeper of the dune: it was a shadow monitor, a person from the Project: so perhaps they had not implanted a monitor in his car that was drawn up at the end of the dune road.

But that was it! His slivers were electrodes! He had known them long ago. Though not where they’d be implanted.

For a moment the limbs or necks or wings seemed to know.

Know what?

Ground said Imp Plus should begin to think of getting ready for some shut-eye, but would Imp Plus please give latest glucose readings. And Imp Plus wondered Ground should say such things when Ground had never needed Imp Plus for such data.

Or had not till now, with the electrodes popping out.

The sliver that the brown woman had brought to his arm in California had been big and not small like the slivers here. Not an electrode. Though with a needle at one end.

Now the limbs or wings or necks or spokes pulsed a milky glow so the cycling of the late light received a salute.

Imp Plus knew that the more that was all around and was from him was growing from his brain.

6

It did not come to him. It went from him. He could not stop knowing that it was to be taken away from him.

If everything was to go away from him maybe it would go away after dark came. Through the lessening light he made out no change in the membrane spokes. Except what began to be a bend in one.

He saw that his sight was not shifting as frequently now from widespread haze to clear and back. And saw that while he was able to think his sight into his outlying limbs he did not.

Because he wanted not to. And the desire had outstripped the memory of why he’d wanted not to.

This thought turned into the caving and burned him inside out. Not on an outlying membrane but close to home, though with that same feel of being independent of him.

He had wanted to stay centrally put and not be dispersed into reaches of himself that were the unknown locus of the spokes. This thought had launched the growing pain all over again. Though it now ripped outward an inside he saw now was curious.

So he had to see it. As he’d seen the glial glue-blasts lapse into independent units of sponge which broke and were more glue-blasts than before. Likewise the fibers had pulsed sideways in the old eye tracts at whose head the fibers had been blocked by the emptiness where they’d been severed.

They pulsed sideways instead: into the temporal lobe, he thought.

Where Ground had given kicks, it said.

Which Imp Plus, said Ground, had given back in return in prefrontal areas 9 and 12. Taken in one place, given back in another.

Since the light was less, he did not have to see as much. So maybe he thought more.

What stopped him? Was he now his own sight? Yes, if he could consent to be dispersed. He could flow freely among the spokes forever. Or receive pulses from Ground as the three jettisoned slivers received from Ground waves of pulse like grasshopper elbows coming on the frequency like an absence of obstacle.

The brown woman who had brought the large sliver to his arm had first come and taken his pulse. Pounding pain was what he’d had, but she had taken his pulse and gone away.

What she’d brought back was not his pulse, it was the sliver, the large one that went into his arm at the bend.

But where was his pulse? He had asked the brown nurse for it. He recalled her, and recalled nurse.

And now in orbit the stranded optic fibers had re-aimed themselves by pulsing sideways out through the tract wall making the code map of where they were going as they went. Imp Plus wondered if this was Earth giving back his pulse. And there was his sight outside the brain. It shifted between fine haze and the single clarity of contours drawn on a blackboard that was green. But the point was that it shifted by pulsing. The pulse came from a place.

Imp Plus looked for the waves folding into the slivers. But he saw only the slivers. Imp Plus thought to answer Ground but did not open his Concentration Loop to the gauge in the agreed way, and said only: GLUCOSE GOOD. GLUCOSE BEAUTIFUL.

Imp Plus wondered if he knew how to activate that Concentration Loop to the gauge any more. The Dim Echo knew, but Imp Plus had let the Dim Echo go.

Imp Plus found, inside the lantern of the brain, hairs like sea threads that beat together. But together as separate sets. That is, one set beat slowly, the next fast, another uneasily yet in its own back-and-forth flow. So Imp Plus singled the Earth line and this was harder now than concentrating to the glucose gauge line, but then he stopped wanting to report the hairs to Ground. He had seen the hairs less long but noticed them only now in the lower light when they were not growing. He let the Earth line go, though Ground might answer his good and his beautiful. He wanted to look. But when he did, the beatings divided and divided and divided into a feeling that was greater than what Ground and the Dim Echo could count, and greater than darkness.

When he became aware all at once of many sets of hairs each steady in its own slow, fast, even or unvaryingly uneven beat, there turned out to be more. He went from an end to another end of his sense so some sets made a line. Then he moved back a rank or up a rank. When the rungs seemed parallel to each other, the angles began to turn. So the ladder became a round ladder. But the roundness veered somewhere and was more a net. The net spread its sets or knots of tiny hairs so that as he looked, this motion was a run of space curved along an ever reopening chance of gradients.

Which, by looking to see more, he multiplied.

He looked for where the pulse of many pulses came from.

Below — as if far below — the dart was not to be seen where its blue discharge had accompanied the Dim Echo’s last report (Hypothalamus active).

Below that was the gland of flame from which he kept his distance furled. The flame was now less furled yet far less bright. But with a light not only lower but more a different light.

The fields of swaying beating tufts of sea hairs went all over. But Imp Plus did not.

He did not look outside for the limbs and the slivers. Did not check algae and the window that had no reticle on it to measure position. Did not see if he could now work the lines to the gauges. Or to Earth.

He made himself into a grip. He was on the soft gray and the glue-white.

Once not long ago he had gone down one side and up out the other. But now he reached fore and aft. The heart that pulsed the pulses was, he thought, the brain. That must be it.

He alone knew. Then he would tell Ground. To see what Ground would say. Yet he wanted not to tell Ground.

The fields of many-waving tufts touched Imp Plus as he opened his grip along a fore-and-aft axis. He did not know where on him these sea hairs touched him, that were part of him. The soft gray and the glue-white still held amber lumens of Sun. These lumens were not packets now. They were one suction everywhere. The hand of the Sun was withdrawing, but it left what its light had become in the store of the brain.

His grip took the lead of his own sight. He did not know what led what, though he was in on it. And now the undulant fields of tufted net-space that had grown by discovery from ladderwork that was straight, then round, then everywhere, now singled out at each end of the curved calipers of his grip into a plow like cross-rung of force.

Yes. A rung, a bar. But a space. A short space alive. Between poles more live than the separated bulbs of an electric eye. Poles fed by a charge of process turning each constantly from positive or negative to both.

Rung or bar impaled on each fork of will plowed silently down and in. Rung, bar, or detached radius.

While way below him, below a fibrous head of membrane nibbling a long gap, below also a point of pink ventricle shimmering between two outer ventricles which now with the ebbing of the Sun seemed distinct, separate, equal shapes of upright fish or ripe-tailed dolphins facing to dance — and below and in front of the once discolored, now shadowed crossing of the eye tracts was the unfurling and more banked gland of flame which still warmed into brown, maroon, and amber boundaries four bodies which were one and were where the blue dart had once brightly cut.

At that point of the blue dart’s pain the Dim Echo had said some part was active. If those bodies or islands down above the flame were where the Dim Echo had meant, the word for the part did not matter. Round the straight line of the Dim Echo’s data Imp Plus could spin a spiral even if he could not laugh. The California woman’s hand had run a spiral ladder up his spine. Later she brought the small brown of her nipples up to him to turn into one whole face then the loin of its open mouth then the multiplied nipplets of her velvet tongue: and all brought with them that desire that dissolved into its own unknown the fear of what was to come: the divided operating table that bent up from table to chair and back to table at the end, and earlier the brown-faced nurse slipping a hypo in the bend of his arm as if to take out of him what it was that made him not go with everything else.

He had many bends — he saw them — but no arm. And if the part the Dim Echo had named was what the blue dart had been in, these bodies down above the gland of flame were not one part but four. And clusters at that. For the time being.

From these families and from all the turning cavities and colored motions Imp Plus saw, the Sun’s ray was retiring. Imp Plus recalled that the blond and ash-red, green-gilded or silvered yellow did not belong to the planes and chambers, spindles, gaps, sacs, drops, and pored skins that held them like a million bloods of the Sun. But some of the sea hairs got thick, then narrowed in a relay other than their swaying, and thickened into a lenslike transparency as if pumping the color elsewhere only to contract into color again. And the color here or down the planes or swelling the drops might show orange or blue-green from a point beneath, but then be chalky brown or singed pink from higher off — say, ten o’clock. Ten o’clock came to him. A word for a place to see from. Did the colors belong to all these parts? The parts and their colonies, whose color varied with where they were seen from, knew how to hold their color or if not their color their ties to it and to the Sun’s running airs.

But to Imp Plus?

His grip came into being. It was what he wanted. Fore and aft. Heading out, down, in. Leading the way the fore and after rungs arced out and away over hills made of the same twigs, spines, and feelers as before, and the same glue cells tonguing onto stems as before, when Imp Plus moved through the sides of the brain.

The light was less and less; so the sparks firing from twig across to branch made more glow. But dropping over opposite hills he wanted to reach and get the rungs back. For what he reached was that small hand from a distance he could not use. That hand was what he reached, a small hand seated on a huge, singing wheel that turned beside the sea. The small hand he reached was seated in a falling rung on a seat he could not now use.

The rungs arced out and down and in. The fore rung dropped more slow and not so deep as the after rung. It was like unequal growing. But his own. But what happened now made Imp Plus recall being tired, because he must be tired now by the twilight bedding the lantern canals and the colonies as if they did not know him going about their work whose gloaming use he would try to feel without the power of that pain now absent. For when both rungs reached a long chasm dividing everything gray, white, blue-green, and amber-red narrowly in two — and what lay below was not the brain — the rungs straddled the divide. But kept on moving. Now in. Working like bridges on rollers, on tracks along the banks of the chasm, and what lurked below and was not the brain could still be seen from the frontal rung but not now from the rear rung. But what happened to tire Imp Plus was that he felt not in two places at once. Except this was not what was tiring, but offered the reverse. While what he saw ought to be tiring was the rungs. Which bridged a divide he now saw down through only by working through the cells where the two sides of the fissure met. But what was worse than tiring was then not really the difference between fore and aft; not between the same nerve and glue cells in front, and these and new cells in back; or between the new, long bulb-tipped horseshoe limbs inside which the fore rung now ran — and the climbing fibers and mossy fibers, radiating stars, baskets, and seaweed tuning forks among whose frequent right angles the rear rung passed like air in foliage. (He did not know foliage.) What was other than tiring was that the rungs thought their way along all this independent of him.

Or what was tiring was the need to be at two points when he felt in one. He was not equal to it. But they in their increase or motion were not equal to each other.

These two. Fore and aft, through which two arms or ends or pincers moved now toward each other. And absently: for what did he get from this will to grip? Or what did it touch or do up among the tangled backward-tending tendrils split out from the horseshoe limbs he thought (and knew he thought) were old nerves of smell; and what did this gripping will touch or do back among planes of tree-branch folia, planes like flattened leaves, and among folds so many, so packed, so fine their slowed cycles and endless-fingered special bodies were ready to be reached by many motions at once and be the monitor or balance or union of these things.

But the rungs of his grip also looked forward for something to do and closed toward each other, the backward-bound forward rung a bit higher than the forward-bound after rung. But they slowed.

They were approaching the gland of flame. It had now spread out powering the islands above. A power thought that Imp Plus felt was not only light.

Yet he knew that it was not for fear of that stored power that the rung ends of his caliper grip came to a halt here. Rather they were being dragged outward. Dragged by fatigue and by its opposite. Dragged by the sight of the smell tendrils in the frontal brain homing back out of the bulb-tipped horseshoe toward other tendrils coming laterally from the truncated eye tracts. Dragged too by the joint leaning which, closer, was the finest movement up toward those buoyed islands and out toward the widening clefts of dusk in the capsule. Dragged also then by a memory grown new in the rungs by a reach of act’s breath taken, inhaled, used, and given back by desire for act to then inhale.

Each rung now was an old radius turned spindle: turning free of the uncompleted ellipse of his pincer grip to spin through the evening spaces of the brain.

Till the grip itself turned, and was the sweep arc of this oval hemisphere: the place he had felt himself in when he could feel himself in one place not two.

Some eye tendrils had joined some smell tendrils. Some of these had divided into the sea hairs, and some had swayed away from pause as if slowly to surprise themselves with what they would think — and had reached up through the flanks of the brain to lean in parallels near the gorge of certain more active clefts. New hollows leaned not toward the light which had all but gone, but to each other.

The sweep arc was the hemisphere in motion.

A locus helmeting his home.

Housing in its course if not a true hemisphere a whole flash of relations flowing through every distance which idea would reach to touch, flowing as all the sides of his sight. From this center he would see now more clearly than any pulse from Ground would tell him what had gone on in the large green room on Earth where the Good Voice and others agreed on unknowns, and in the small green room where the Acrid Voice coughed up knowns. See now more clearly than the Acrid hand sweeping back around and down and in along the bottom to complete a chalk ellipse.

Imp Plus from his new center with its layers of trees and skeins of light headed through ventricle reservoirs, saw what the woman did with his pulse. She took it and went away and came back with a syringe instead. A disposable syringe.

For what?

Imp Plus felt a turn that was not this locus turn. He did not know where it was. It did not fit. It came with what he knew was the growth pain; but it wasn’t painful. He would look for the Dim Echo. He would find words in the Dim Echo that would tell what the California woman’s syringe did. He knew he had known. But he did not know why he did not now know. He knew there were two California women, the beach one and the nurse. He was losing them. Or a way between them.

He thought what the gland below the island had done with its flame. He tried to know what now a clear cluster of dim edges did turning into a line to lean toward the new turn — this new turn — that he’d just felt but could not place.

However, he might try to know what the cluster did, the cluster spilling into a line knew what to do, he thought. Yet it was some part of him, he knew — the cluster, the line, and the doing. He looked into the cluster that had turned into this line and he saw the tiny suck that he’d seen before, or its process, or slide, and near it he saw ovals. They were for nourishment and had a name he could not place and had smaller things going on inside where not so many had been before. His sight found sugar and in the same row its resulting absence. A net narrowed and drew through him, like that cylinder or like that gut. Drew through him toward the distant turn or bend that was not here any more than he was the center. He let himself be drawn out looking back to the nonetheless near oval shapes and the membrane suck, itself unseen not because Imp Plus failed but because it was a gradient event. It pumped against the gradient flow, this suck, as if needs of some potential blood remembered from the Sun wished to open constantly some wondrous inequity between inside the cell and outside in the sea about it. So the suck slid its charges across the skins of cells. A smell of sugar and burning came with Imp Plus, who was not home and knew he was not lost but did not understand the brain or his sight of many sizes.

Except one thing — as Ground, asking what was GLUCOSE BEAUTIFUL, requested another reading since glucose was too high: one thing Imp Plus knew was that they would not give him this sight of many sizes if they had it to give.

Down through great thicknesses of pulses Imp Plus looked back to the chasm which the rungs had bridged and he found now through the chasm a motion that was not his, and for a moment the chasm parted him into a fear that was neither the broken, divided operating table becoming a chair or the breaking of his body from what would be kept, but was the dividing of him from himself. He thought he would be glad of the Dim Echo’s presence. He heard Ground speak of sleep, and he was of two minds but did not know mind.

But even before he was drawn up almost like the hand of the Sun in what the Dim Echo now called, at different moving distances, “Premotor cortex,” Imp Plus knew a sprinkling of centers but no one center.

This cleft was narrow still but Imp Plus felt on him a webbed bulge as he reached the lip of the capsule’s dark. Off by a bulkhead he made out a slope of the hemisphere where it had been hanging adrift before. A pale light touched the window. The first window ever built into an IMP. But no reticle had been imprinted on the window because no man would be there to—to land, said the words — no — to measure position. But the window thought for itself; he remembered that; but could not see if the window thought of him.

There was light through it. Imp Plus did not know if the light was stars or (and the word came on the old axis of distance) the Moon.

He could not spot the slivers now or recall the thing the woman had done with the syringe. But the turn he had felt before in the lighted heart of the brain, he now saw: the bend he had noticed still earlier out there in one spoke or reach had grown around and so far that now it nearly touched the adjacent limb. Or had it moved but not really grown?

But as if to prove Imp Plus was watching, the bend moved. And the Dim Echo very close by was saying to Ground, O.K.

For Ground had ordered Imp Plus to sleep.

7

But Imp Plus did not sleep. He let the Dim Echo do his sleeping for him, was that it? Yet also Imp Plus did not know sleep. The word for it from Ground felt like a line along a middle between sides. But he did not know sleep. He saw large and small. All that was new about this was that he knew he’d been doing it for many turns of day and night so he wanted words to count the turns and he thought to draw these words to him along the axis of distance.

But to where?

He was at the narrow cleft. It was a cleft of the brain. Back down the cleft when he looked the dim facets that had been in a line leaned away and withdrew to be again a cluster.

But a cluster now with a pollen shine and a glint of net.

Which had not been seen when this cluster of pump, oval, and other small motions had turned to a line just when Imp Plus had let himself be drawn out to the narrow cleft in what the Dim Echo had called premotor cortex.

Where to see the Dim Echo?

Imp Plus looked, and the clustered facets inclined again to this cleft he’d been drawn to. Other clusters everywhere did also, singling down to brief lines in his direction. They reached at him, and he could be the Sun out of sight around a corner and they were inhaling to drag out of the brain’s night this light that was left.

But then these lines of outflow slung their lengths back and were clusters. Imp Plus could have chosen to see the lines from many points, and points moving and not moving. He had chosen to. But he did not know if those lines, now withdrawn into clusters, had been as long as they had gone on.

All these works went on without him. Yet it was him they were.

A touch came. A message like the nurse’s needle. A point of force spread upon him to be a screen. The screen or plane had unfolded at the cleft except Imp Plus did not see how. For past the shadow of strands lax or tightening in the corners of his eyes, he could see out through the cleft as before to the capsule bulkheads and the glimmer of his growth. But wherever the plane or field was, once spread across it the force made him — or made him want to — move his eyes from one side to another and back.

Which made him want to have the eyes to do it with. Or want to think he had. For he knew he didn’t have.

Not eyes like those he’d lost that were like the woman’s other-colored eyes he’d smelled at the California shore.

Or seen and loved and wanted. Though not smelled, or not known he smelled, till here now tight or lax through sugars sliding from chamber to vein.

Not chamber or vein of eyes. Yet sugars. Lactic. Lactic sugars.

He had got somewhere almost.

And doubly. For he brought back, and instantly returned for an instant to, that after part of the brain through which the aft caliper of will had passed: the part which the Dim Echo sleeping nearby might give a name to and where the fine folds of muscle—muscle was the word — must wait and want for far-flung motions or motors to pass, seeking themselves. Not the rings of cell muscling the ends of the California woman’s rainbow iris in across the pupil’s gap in his memory, or one he thought was his. Instead, other muscles he could not find, but could want, but could not wait for.

He had come almost to see a thought. Which meanwhile like a constant map of him watched him, he thought, not he it.

Then the touch was gone, and he saw that it had not been like the nurse’s needle, which had made him lose sight of her. He looked to find the Dim Echo. But he found all the night cities of the brain as if he were not here. And he looked out past a brief, gray glitter at the lip of the cleft which he thought to be a membrane starting with the webbed bulge he had centered on, though he felt also everywhere. At an unknown distance hung a solid curve of dusky, blue-mottled pearl. He knew what he’d once seen on Earth but as quickly saw that he could not be seeing through the bulkhead — and the window was not in that direction. Beyond the lip of the cleft were the wings, necks, spokes, organs, exits, or entrances: which were maybe none of these, though he was sure of one thing, that they had gone from the brain.

But they had made the brain what he couldn’t find in himself to see: made the brain other than what they had come from. The map of how to get back changed.

The capsule was darker. Ground might have changed attitude. Over and in the chlorella beds a feeling of light constantly receded and was there. The outer light that was not the Sun but might be a distant milk of stars and had maybe named itself the Moon could itself have shifted.

The outlying parts were there, but they were him more than he could see them. Yet he saw what he saw. The bend curled in still more. For in the fine light of itself, it wanted to join the nearby limb, or keep going and curl back toward the brain.

The lights of the outlying membranes were under the membranes. Each light a layer of length going on holding the Sun that was not here now.

The cleft to which Imp Plus had felt drawn contracted as the outlying limb curled. But both stopped. Imp Plus had a slowness in the outlying limbs. Or did not now feel much of what was going on there. He was alone with himself. He thought this inside. The Dim Echo was near and inside, not off among the outlying plasms. The Dim Echo was asleep. With lights on. Asleep lighted by the glove of feelers the Sun’s departed hand had left. Did the wings sleep? What light disturbed their membranes? Light they gave themselves. Without eyes the Dim Echo was not disturbed by light. Here inside the brain — or what had been the brain from which whatever had sprung, the light stored from the Sun’s day was more than light.

Still, light helped Imp Plus see this. These flows.

In the gold shadow over each pale red flow he saw — but not till he should want to — a full galaxy of colors. They were what he’d seen when he’d first recalled the woman’s eyes. The gold shadow was also underneath. The gold shadow was what showed the other colors in the pale red. He could not tell if he now smelled the sweet flow or recalled the smell; he saw down inside and forward of the islands and the gland. Saw what he knew must be a different size — the tendrils not only glowing from the horseshoe lobes he and the forward rung had thought to be his broken smell, but also throwing toward these gold-shadowed pink flows motions like transmissions.

Waves.

Which he saw made what was not a flow at all but many single bodies of rainbow red that were even more a flow through the shadow gaps of gold between. And each body now turned, but in a smaller size, and flexed like a single muscle shorn to a weightless space on its own until with a sweet burn that did not pain Imp Plus each body receiving the waves became two bodies of a thicker but paler hue but soon were hard to see and came back as other bodies of that dilute red.

The light had been stored. But there was more and more.

And as if he had heard Earth before Earth spoke, he heard: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS CAP COM TO IMP PLUS ARE YOU COLD ENOUGH UP THERE IMP PLUS?

Again, touch came. It was a spasm, a jab of dryness on his tongue, and with it a need to move eyes he did not have from one side to the other and back and so forth. And so he did.

But then Imp Plus fixed his look upon the bodies and their flow and the rainbow range surfacing like a shadow of the gold, and he was able to stop the rapid eye motion set off by the touch. But there were so many bodies, his attention was drawn back to the lip of the cleft. Yet not just by the bodies and the unpleasant force that jabbed him to motions he knew he could not make alone, and not by the Dim Echo’s slow words (which Imp Plus kept to himself) SLEEP, SLEEP, LIGHT SLEEP PRECEDES DEEP SLEEP. COLD WILL COME WITH DARK CYCLE. No his attention was drawn back to the lip of the cleft by his own desire to have if not those lost eyes a hand.

Though not the hand he had looked at — a last look, a last look, for that hand was lost on Earth. No, another hand that he could only think at the long moment when the nurse’s syringe went in his arm at the bend which was unbent to receive it, and he looked away from the point to the palm with its parchment shine of crisscross and the fingers curving larger and larger the further they sank beyond. And he tried to hold his eyes but couldn’t.

But now there were no eyes like that. And he could push back the jabbing touch by wanting to. Or by looking down on the button glint of gray at his cleft’s lip in the premotor cortex.

See at the same time waves from Earth on course enter that gray-glinting crystal point.

Then he knew what it was. It was another sliver implanted here to touch Imp Plus. For Earth to touch him. The waves stopped. But the gray crystal now stirred above the dilating bulge.

Imp Plus waited he did not know how long, and then he made the rapid eye movements to see if he could without the electrode’s prompting. But he could not recall what this had been, for now he could not pass the one whole flesh and wedge of watching from here to there without seeing that he was already there waiting for himself. And yet as he hit upon this, he thought he became one more shift different. He was steadily not the same; or if not he, what had been his brain.

The Dim Echo Imp Plus could not look down upon but only look for. But more.

For Imp Plus had felt somewhere by him an opening like a growth radiate outward. He had held this for himself, not let it go far outward.

Imp Plus had the words of the Dim Echo asleep or half awake, like stored work of the Sun’s hand in the membranes.

The words were: “O.K., optimum warmth. Solar flow holds. Glucose stable. Glucose beautiful. Cold will come when dark cycle comes. Sleep.” Imp Plus had not let the words go to Earth.

So cold had not come.

Yet the Dim Echo who when dark cycle had come had O.K.’d the order SLEEP, now did not seem to know the dark cycle had come. Imp Plus tried an answer. The Dim Echo did not know the dark cycle had come, because the Dim Echo slept.

The flows did not know either. If there was anything to know. Imp Plus saw as many as he wanted or expected, though not as few. He saw through the gold shadow’s colors to the business of the bodies within bodies. The skins of the larger were screens. They pulsed so clearly Imp Plus remembered breathing.

They were membranes bending in and out. Screens that the smaller bodies squeezed through. Squeezed through where no holes were until Imp Plus saw them. And these bodies in order to squeeze through got larger not smaller.

He saw the body like a bad-angled spacecraft bounce on the screen and not get through. Then it found and grabbed and was held by what became a carrier. Then was joined by another thing. This thing was barely there. And not on or in, but off. It was a function pried off. Pried off the very small suck pumping an inclination, a gradient, and he knew the pump but could not see it except in its idea across the pulsing membrane. The body embraced by the passive carrier and joined by a piece of the familiar pump could then slide inside the skin. Then, once inside, glow and part. Be two. And fade into a light that was Imp Plus himself. And breathed through and back through the snowy glue cells and the cells that sparked, and what went on was that these firing cells were split into cells that did not fire and that seemed earlier, but grew and then divided without being hit by the breathing glow of those other divisions inside membranes. And as for those — the body, the carrier, the pump piece, their passage through a skin and their united division — he thought he knew what he was seeing. Or smelling, or remembering the smell of. And as he thought he was seeing glucose events, though he did not know the cells that did not fire, he could see for a moment into the fade itself. And what he saw was a great part of a bow or arc.

Slow sugars rained down it. Their grand soft light was outlined by the dark of the cycle. Some of these firing cells split into cells that didn’t fire but divided — which seemed a reversal. Imp Plus swung his look rapidly here and there, turned elsewhere in order to think: to think that since the Dim Echo was wrong about dark, it could be wrong about cold. Imp Plus did not know cold. He wanted the Dim Echo to tell him where to find it.

Ground spoke again, and as if Earth had turned away with the Sun, the distance was more: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS ANSWER IF YOU CAN. IMP PLUS YOU ARE ALREADY IN DARK CYCLE BUT WE READ TEMPERATURE STEADY AT ONLY FOUR DEGREES BELOW DAYTIME.

Imp Plus held on to the answering words of the Dim Echo and did not let them go: cold will come with dark cycle.

IMP PLUS WE READ NO DROP IN POWER STORED IN ACCUMULATOR. WE READ HIGH CORTICAL ACTIVITY, LOOKING LIKE R.E.M. SLEEP IN ALL AREAS WE MONITOR. BUT THIS IS LIGHT SLEEP PERIOD IMP PLUS TOO EARLY FOR R.E.M. SLEEP.

Imp Plus held on to the slow answering words of the Dim Echo and did not let them go: cold will come with dark cycle. Light sleep precedes R.E.M. sleep. Sleep.

ARE YOU ASLEEP OR NOT, IMP PLUS. DO NOT BREAK SLEEP CYCLE BUT ANSWER IF YOU CAN.

Imp Plus did not know accumulator; but he did not know power either. Yet it had been in him. At the last words of the message the huge arc which was only a part of an arc could be seen for what it was: countless arcs each with its own aiming rain of sugars. Did he know how he had kept the Dim Echo from answering Earth? Imp Plus saw these many arcs were what he had seen before: each had its own center and its spokes: yet spokes radiant not from each center but from the dark-outlined arc itself as if each arc could be a locus center in the form of a curved line.

Seeing these many parts of arcs also so many, he smelt a sweet burn of his own pain and he slid down the one huge cycle out of the countless small, and saw that he had both.

The one huge one was also just a part, not more whole than the elongated circle of his will come round with its fore and aft caliper rungs but not meeting. Though come maybe closer than the ends of this one huge arc now. The many making one. The one huge. But also a part. So all the more huge. Yet made of the burning countless small. Made by — he could not say it — he was in the mist of gold shadow — the staggering spectrums of countless whole new colors were like the many small arcs, and the gold shadow where they sheltered was the one huge arc—made by—he could not say it — not only because it was not only him (he said it) but what had been given him, the stored gold blood from the Sun’s late hand: but also then for him itself, and here he saw his doubt had been golden, he’d felt it like stored flesh; and not knowing how to want the Dim Echo not to answer Ground, he had been given his desire. Which was part.

A part he must come to know.

He wondered what that would be.

The Dim Echo, which was not so dim, had said, “Cold will come.”

But what was will? Maybe he had known.

Imp Plus would like to ask the Dim Echo.

How long had it been asleep? It had been asleep when it said, “Cold will come.”

Will come was come, but not now. Come then.

Now was any point of the gold-pink sugar slides. Now was the gray glint of the sliver head here in the cleft which was one of many Imp Plus centered on.

He concentrated on the sliver head and then he saw that Earth’s last message had sunk into the night and he had been feeling the old sweet ripping burn of the pain and now was not.

That was then. Like the cave-crash of burn that had stopped for the time being or been turned now into the night work of the stored Sunlight. But not like the sugars that had slid past him down one of the dark cycles; for though that was then, too, the sugars slid now as well, they were not different, though what he did — if anything now — was different: what he’d done then when the sugars slid down a dark cycle, was stick up arms he did not have and press against the clear-curved skull he did not have, until it lifted off.

Ground was after him again but he had to be here now and he looked again at this premotor cleft. The bulge at its brink was now bigger. The cleft had dilated more. So the here and now were not now the same.

He had nothing to stand on; the bulge he was on was him. The bulge was on the brink of the cleft, the cleft was in a fold, the fold was more open, and when it was all open it would not be a fold. He could not help wanting this, but with each unfolding a fold was gone. Ground knew that the capsule was not as cold as expected and that there had been no drop in power stored in the accumulator, but Ground did not know other things. Imp Plus could keep answers from going to Ground but he could not keep the woman at the seashore. But this was not it: he meant instead that he could not keep the woman at the seashore from coming on the axis of distance; could not help her from unfolding him, yet he had wanted it.

And had always known the axis of distance was coming.

Always was then. Yet now, too.

Though not just here, though he was here. The night felt like many nights — nights of nights. The night divided and went on.

He could not bear something. Another pain. This pain was not the cave or split of growing, nor the axis of distance. But the axis of distance was one turning spoke of it. The new pain was as small as silence, but now, he saw, as large — a silent stretch, the absence of crash. But more still: an absence in general, but gold and many-colored.

An absence which he found then that he filled: by looking from all the night arcs of blood sugar whose idea he smelled; and by looking and straining from them beyond the one huge arc-part with its wheeling falls; staring unequally to where all these wheeled from. He felt what he saw — was that it? He found himself both seeing from all his membranes’ unequal distances and simultaneously waiting to receive his sight. It — was this it? — was waiting for itself before it got there: he was what he was seeing: so was this why he could take the sights beamed from the membrane-limbs’ unequal distances and receive this sight’s gathering onset and (wait) by being what he saw, both pin his sight into a point as small as (wait) a nerve head, as small as a pump pried by sight itself off the act of its own suck into infinitesimal function: and through it, in turn, see big too, because it held invisible inside its sight an idea of enlargement. See greater than big — far greater than the spreading large-scale sight he felt even at instants when he saw micro-small.

Maybe he was getting warmer, but his look or wish was turned before it got far enough.

For Ground asked if Imp Plus was asleep, and asked again, like a child aiming to wake a grownup. Asked if Imp Plus’s gauge showed a drop in temperature, asked for temperature but asked so that Imp Plus thought in a way he now recalled. Or smelled: for it was the ill will dividing him up: for Ground said Imp Plus could take those readings in his sleep, and the crackling Imp Plus thought he knew in the transmitted words was acrid laughing all over again: not the humor that once flowed from the bare woman’s eyes in California — no, the crackling humor now from Ground was what Imp Plus had smelt in the large green room when the Good Voice answered the Acrid Voice and gave Imp Plus time off the last weekend, “away from this goldfish bowl,” the Good Voice had said; “remember all that overtime ahead, day in day out, catching the Sun. A little private recreation is called for.” For the Acrid Voice had first said what if Imp Plus changed his mind, and now in answer to the Good Voice the Acrid Voice had said like a dim reflection, “Recreation,” and smoke came out of mouth and nose. So now Imp Plus felt the Acrid crackling when Ground said Imp Plus could take the temperature readings in his sleep.

Warm or cold was what the readings were. But was no temperature drop like no power drop in the accumulator?

Cap Com said the capsule couldn’t be so warm as the Ground gauge read. Warm was what Imp Plus thought the Sun was. The woman at the California seashore had said so when she rose out of the water. But the Sun was not here now. Ground was also not here.

The Sun came and went.

But Ground was always there.

The Sun could be where Ground was, but not always. There was more to it, and Imp Plus thought the Dim Echo knew. But the Dim Echo slept.

Not Ground. Its messages kept coming on the frequency. The frequency could not be the waves coming into the slivers that were adrift, for these slivers were not now implanted in Imp Plus.

IMP PLUS IMP PLUS DO YOU READ DO YOU READ?

He could not stop receiving but he did not have to answer.

CAP COM TO IMP PLUS CAP COM TO IMP PLUS WE READ MAXIMUM POWER IN ACCUMULATOR. WHAT’S UP? ARE YOU CONSERVING POWER?

He thought he would answer Ground. But he could only seek this other pain that offered. So he went on leaning to get where all the arcs of flow rolled from. To do this he must stretch across something inside him. A distance. Yet he did not see the distance till he had stretched. The brain with its scattered centers seemed to find the power to disperse still more. The distance inside did not make him feel good. The distance he straddled kept unfolding in what he had been feeling was the brain. He defended against the distance; but the distance was not more — not there — unless he stretched for the pain.

So that splitting he thought himself in two, thought of how Ground’s word SLEEP was like a line along a middle, and tried to see if the Dim Echo was on one side. The more he stretched the more he straddled, but straddling he was not on two sides of the lean over which he persisted in being, he was on many. When he was stretched too far, he recalled legs. And when he did, he dropped and was burned at a distance by that deep gland that once had furled and unfurled its fire. The gland was below the bodies or islands. But seemed to enrich and power them by filling the spaces up between them. Yet he was not seeing the power of the now flameless gland, for reaching at him into his straddling fall it caught him in an underfork of himself exposed. Then his stretch collapsed back into itself and with it distance it had leaned to cross. But as it did so, and also thought to do the opposite and open and stretch again, he knew that he had brought the gland to him.

By demanding time.

And he knew that the cool wet woman rising along his Sun-warm legs was some of the time-off though she didn’t know that what she found on him was more than California Sun. For the bright glint off there in the dune was more than one; it was two. And each lens of the dune watcher’s dark glasses reflected more than Sun and the woman and Imp Plus as he was: they reflected as well the large green project room and the shadow cast after Imp Plus that last weekend in order not to give him what he wanted — time alone.

They had not trusted him.

To be outside.

The pain that was not the split and not just the axis of distance offered itself again.

Imp Plus stretched to meet across the void.

Like trust, it was a void he resisted but brought into being.

Along its new edges the arc-flows rolled. He could not follow them yet to where they began but must see that the void came into being just because he went against it. Knowing this, he did not drop, this time.

Again, the gland below fired some underpart of him.

Which underpart? In reply, he remembered a wonderful wanting cup of himself. It had once been a midpoint — now no more mid than point. But wanting still.

To do something.

Which proved to be: first think what it had once wanted and done at the same time when it had been a midbed of the body.

The body the woman had climbed in the Sun. Bringing all the salt out of the sea with her. To pause on that midpart of him for a time: a time that like this night divided and divided into its own measure of her: of her repose. Hence, a time so set off from the glint of the dune watcher that, seeing down through the optic crossing and through the lower islands named by the Dim Echo and now, behind the radiant gland whose force fired him, to a backward-slanting seam along which a field of cells shone yellow-soaked as if due to something else, Imp Plus felt her repose acting upon him and inclined to think he projected that yellow with his sight and inclined to find his sight solely a reflection of the gland’s warm power.

But thought so because of the woman. Because what she gave — the time she gave — that threw the project’s glinting dune shadow light-years away — had made him think his desire all hers.

Which was not so. For, like the Sun got by her from his body, the desire which the dune glasses in a flash fixed in him came from far behind those glasses. It came from a bolt probed into being in the midbed of his body in the large green room where he had asked for time off. Probed into being by that word recreation — a plan for the man they did not trust.

Where was Cap Com?

Yet the word recreation that came from the Acrid Voice only reflected from the Good Voice. Though further back it was the Acrid Voice: saying, “You don’t want to go on forever.”

Said with an ill will.

While the Good Voice, always so sure, always stuck to the point: Overtime day in day out, to catch and milk the Sun.

That was the project. Capture.

In the dark cycle Imp Plus recalled the force of the Sun and what he had known before launch.

There was more of him now than at launch: more of him to do the remembering: yet did he now remember less?

But in other words.

The project was the Sun. Here was what he had been looking for when Ground had broken in: he’d been looking for where all these arcs of busy lumen wheeled from.

Ground spoke. Ground spoke. Imp Plus was believed to be in part awake. Imp Plus was asked if in the absence of a carbon-reaction gauge Imp Plus could feel a high coming from the algae conduits, for there was an outside chance nitrogen from the plants was getting into Imp Plus’s system raw so Imp Plus would be getting what water divers called rapture of the depths.

Imp Plus did not answer and felt no motion in the Dim Echo to do so.

Ground asked if Imp Plus was not answering in order to conserve power; Ground said waking and deep sleep were not possible at the same time, yet Ground read rapid low-voltage waves, which were waking, at the same time that it read volleys of high-voltage spikes and R.E.M. equivalents, which meant deep sleep; and Ground, in strange, patient detail, pointed out that the accumulator storing electrical energy from the cells in the solar arrays continued at maximum: but this could not happen, Ground said.

Imp Plus did not answer.

ARE YOU RECEIVING US IMP PLUS? IF YOU ARE RECEIVING US YOU MUST BE USING UP POWER.

In the dark, Imp Plus saw the paddles turning the wind, turning the wind into force. That was it.

But no, there was a difference: between what he saw when he looked at the arc-parts cycling the lights of the brain’s land and what he saw when he saw the great grid panels milling the wind outside in the black land of space. For there was no wind. There was no air where the panels milled the solar wind.

And they were not here, though they were of Imp Plus.

They were not inside the brain. But they were not inside the capsule, whose bulkheads were outside the brain or what he had thought the brain. The panels receiving the solar wind, which was no wind but a rain of rays, were of the capsule, but not in it, and he only thought he was seeing them.

Ground was outside the capsule, but it made sounds Imp Plus received inside. That was it. The oblong cells on the panels caught Ground and got Ground from outside inside. The oblong cells on the panels might not be the cells of Imp Plus, but they were part of what he was part of.

The cells were of the capsule but outside.

The oblong cells he saw, the grids of cells, the panels of grids of cells, he recalled pictures or other models of other craft maybe not IMP with windmill paddles that bore the panels of grids of cells; but did he really see? He heard them in the mixed voices Acrid, Good, and other.

He did not really see the cells because they were outside and he was always inside. Though on Earth he had been outside them once, and there were panels of cells but no windmill, the windmill was in his head, and a project voice not Acrid and not Good had been speaking into the head Imp Plus did not now have. The cells received the Sun and gave the capsule power to receive the Ground.

But now it was night — a night of nights dividing itself yet turning toward an end. There was no Sun outside, except very far outside: around a curve like the axis of distance, but greater: for this curve moved.

Which meant, he saw, that what Sun there was from the solar cells was saved from when there had been Sun. Saved as power.

With rapture, the Good Voice had said, “The Sun hits the arrays; it can’t get away. We got it.”

But was this trapped Sun the same as the Sun’s hand Imp Plus had found inside himself?

The Acrid Voice mingled more words, but said what Imp Plus was now able only to see: a rain of airless wind struck light through a mesh scraped from Earth’s skin; each drop of light punched a jot out of what the light hit, then each jot went for a hole but was made to go into a waiting stem. He thought himself divided between what he saw and what he had once only thought. He saw some jots skid off into space like a spacecraft whose bad angle re-entering is not bad enough to burn it up in the Earth’s atmosphere. He saw light turned into grains moving. But turned also into light.

Yes: light turned into light. It was not what anyone Acrid or Good had said happened, and so Imp Plus radiated waves of doubt that came along the axis of distance. But radiated them from himself, through and to himself. He saw that this light whether tapped for use or stopped was turned to just motion: but doubt or not, the light hitting the panels of gridded cells had turned to light. Imp Plus went across the field of what he thought was his brain wanting some sight that what he’d seen was true. Not sight of light so much as a thing about the light. But every turn along which he inclined to find support for what he’d thought, gapped into sudden holes: he might chase over an inner eyelid-skin of limit for what he knew was there, only to get fresh absence; or he leaned steeply into each subordinate void of hole to find it then gone and gone in such a speed of light he saw instead he thought a network lattice quite without speed. Or beyond speed, so the lattice bent always away from limit. Bent back constantly to what he might have thought to be himself, had not this deep substance been already him everywhere in all its grids and jots. His thought leaned after itself but was evaded. Not like the Sun’s many-fingered hand withdrawing, for what it left it left, and these lumens — fall, flow, pass as they must — still stayed put. What escaped was motion of himself. So the very brain, if it still was the brain, slid its canal beds — or, if he could have fixed himself at one point, seemed to slide and distribute its canal beds — and radiant layers of spark-smeared glue field and amber inclination away from themselves and toward some aim their nearing presence might have sent ahead.

He was standing at one point.

And he did not chase why light turned into light.

For it came to Imp Plus that support was so close at hand it was nowhere else, and he had been here before; or had seen these jots or particles punched out of cells by drops of light because he had seen missing from his own cells parts or particles which when their resulting absences overtook them looked identical to these particles or jots though these had been punched out by Sun drops and those others in himself expelled by radiance Ground could not understand was everywhere here and so had no need to be hunted down.

He could not hold the tan woman. She faded back into the dune watcher’s glancing glasses, but also into whole tan terrains of Earth implanted with fields of reflectors dishing up the Sun. More and more reflectors subtracting terrain, so that the future held fewer and fewer persons.

Subsisting.

But the fields of reflectors with their competing black bodies caught the Sun so slowly the Good Voice came between these fields with the project.

The last Apollos had long left the beaches of the Moon.

Where to go?

Man the Moon.

Over my dead body, said the Good Voice.

The Acrid Voice coughed and coughed, but wanted nothing of the kind.

The Sun was the thing, the Good Voice was always saying.

A beautiful living bomb of a cow, the Good Voice and the Acrid Voice said when Imp Plus drew their words together. Milk it, said one. Feed it, said the other; and acrid laughter joined ill will, and Imp Plus saw the ill will was not against him.

Saw then?

Saw now.

But if they didn’t milk it, said the Good Voice, where was the milk going to come from? The fields? The shining sands? Ovals chalked on greenboards by minds?

Imp Plus did not know mind. But now in the long night whose length held other nights spent in space with the Dim Echo, he knew the Acrid Voice’s answer: Give the Sun an outside chance.

Man the Sun, said the Good Voice.

No, coughed the Acrid Voice, just let the Sun show us.

Let it support us, said the Good Voice. Fix nitrogen in the beds, crash solar wind into it, get carbon in an energy-rich reactive state.

Let the Sun, said the Acrid Voice, dream up a life-support system.

Manned missions are over, said the Good Voice.

But over what? thought Imp Plus now, wanting to see: what he now at once then did see: a round of micropumps that had become one run conduct themselves toward wherever the heart was that pumped his clear life-humor.

Over what? came his own answer — and the failed run retracted into the rounds and rounds of tiny pumps he had thought to find the start of.

Over what?

For what had Imp Plus been, at the last, but an ill body over an ill will? Divided then, but into what? Divided into orbits.

He got ahead of himself but was afraid he had stopped. And the thought of light that he had leaned into unknown inclinations to chase now spun or spread all ways away from him, except that he saw that he was it. He got the idea that there was less spin per thought now, but the idea did not change what he looked at.

What was Imp Plus to have done out among these orbits?

Read readings Earth read too. Get some Sun. Be weightless. Subsist. Travel light. He picked what to see and he saw large and small, but he could not have less than this power, and what use was it?

The woman had said “Travel light,” but that wasn’t Operation TL. Her wants were not of Operation TL.

Were his?

He was expected only to react. Like the algae.

But not like the algae, for the algae had no Concentration Loop to speak through.

It is all for you, the Good Voice said.

There were other tests in the dark capsule. What was the hemisphere adrift?

Imp Plus thought how to use the Concentration Loop and thought that he might not know how any more.

Earth’s transmissions had gone away.

And here, there was less motion per thought; let Earth come round the other side when it was ready.

All for you, the Good Voice said.

But all what?

Look, said the Acrid Voice in the other room, it’s the algae and the other test beds — that’s what it is — and they don’t need you, you need them. You could turn green like a broccoli.

Like a hand of spinach. More likely, spun into some substance, some unmanned substance.

The Concentration Loop to which the Acrid Voice had introduced Imp Plus should become second nature; but what it was for was Earth: to get Imp Plus’s reactions by frequency impulse back to Earth.

That’s all you get out of it, pure and simple, a voice had said, and Imp Plus had reacted against the smile that had come with the voice because he could not bear it. He had foreseen himself alone. That was it.

There in the smaller green room and the capsule-to-come, he had foreseen himself alone. For the voice that said, “That’s all you get out of it,” was the Acrid Voice that later had said, “You can’t go on forever,” and Imp Plus saw only now orbiting the night that he had turned toward the door leading to the large green room where the Good Voice made plans — but Imp Plus had not gone to that door. And Imp Plus had known something besides the words “I’m ill” coughed back at the Acrid Voice. He’d known that the Acrid Voice was more alone than the Good, and had made himself so.

And this had made Imp Plus more mad than had the Acrid Voice’s parting remark: which was that Imp Plus might find a way to use the Concentration Loop to talk to himself.

The desire to show them grew in Imp Plus like the drift of substance which he saw now was just what he desired to show. In the outlying membranes the layers of light were lower but had spread. He wanted to say what he thought had been happening through the night. But he might not see this till he tried to say it. He wanted to have what the Dim Echo had.

He would tell better where the Dim Echo was when the Dim Echo stopped sleeping. He thought when the time came Ground would draw the word SLEEP back, for Imp Plus had once felt it as a line along a middle and saw he had not stopped feeling this.

But did not want to do things by halves.

And did not see halves when he looked. Yet did not see the Dim Echo at all. Yet through another night saw that once there had been no Dim Echo.

The night with the woman by the Mexican fire.

Not the woman at the California sea.

The pale one on the night plateau.

Slept with her. He had said SLEEP. What he had meant, he could ask the Dim Echo, but the Dim Echo had not been there around the fire and it was Imp Plus who had said to the woman when they had come back out of the dark and he sat warming a foot that hurt and taking something painful away from the foot until the woman wanted to do it, and it was not fingers she took away from the foot because the fingers were in what he was telling her, the fingers had been his own but meshed and tangled by the child who was not there in the Mexican night with them and who made him try to move the finger she pointed to and he moved the wrong one — and after telling the pale woman this, he had said words that made her laugh and she said he made her feel like a new widow ready to start over again. The words he had said were “Sleep with me.”

But he could not remember what this had meant, if it had meant SLEEP.

He had been very close to her on the ground by the colors of the fire, and his yellow shoes were near her dark hair. There were shifts of substance.

The lumens of the glucose arcs had spread through the night and would have looked lower like the levels of light along the outlying membranes but, more than lower, they were spread. But then Imp Plus understood.

His lights could be lower now because they were being answered.

But the transmission everywhere was not on a frequency. It was too slow or too fast to speed. It came from more than just its own places, and it was first another darkness but it was more a kind of change, and it was not something that Imp Plus himself did, but it visited and stayed with the substance of what had been done, and divided this not into two but into all the mornings Imp Plus had known.

It was the Sun, and the first far thought of the Sun’s breathing.

The Sun was coming back.

And Imp Plus was coming back to the Sun.

This was his deed? He would show the Acrid Voice.

The deep gland flamed out at his sight, and along the seam that slanted down behind the gland the yellow-soaked field of cells had faded. And behind it and deep below the gland brief sections of stripe showed through the crevice which one rung of his will had once passed over. And seeing through the crevice to these sections of stripe — they were tubes — he understood that the tubes were not him but went from him; and were the same tubing he’d seen going into the algae; understood that if the algae and anabaena and other test beds had no Concentration Loop to speak through, they did have loops to Imp Plus.

He could watch through the crevice and yet, like a breathing from all sides, feel waves of substance go through him, which was also the recollection of what had gone on in the night.

When he looked off to the window that he recalled could think for itself and where no grid had been printed for no man would be here to use it to map position, Imp Plus could hardly say what he saw in what he had once seen as the outside body growing from a thing he had thought his brain.

He wanted to say.

But he could not speak to Ground, for what would Ground do? And he had to get something from the Dim Echo and wasn’t about to join the Dim Echo in sleep to get whatever he found he wanted.

Dawn deepened the tube loops. A thing was there which, going far back to the woman in the night plateau or his madness and towering, twisting headache at the Acrid Voice’s parting words, was a wonderful thing: it was that the currents in the tubes moved two ways. They fed from the test beds to him. And they moved out also from him.

And knowing he was all but ready to face the new growth that was now to be seen after this night that sometimes seemed to hold many nights, he was an inclined field of racing independent parts or gaps wanting to tell the Acrid Voice that Sun without doubt came also from himself, from Imp Plus — wanting so much that he called back from the smaller green room words to the effect that he might find a way to use the Concentration Loop to talk to himself: but the words had not been said by the Acrid Voice; they had been said by Imp Plus, and then the Acrid Voice softly added, “You will,” just as less than a year later he would softly reflect the Good Voice’s word recreation.

The Good Voice’s permission had probed the midbed of Imp Plus’s known body, but mainly through the dune-watcher-to-come with his dark glasses reflecting where one known Imp Plus met one known woman with skin that would never be his but that if he wanted with enough force he could have.

He felt knowns waking in him. Known solar panels over a known project’s known power needs.

But known divided by known gave unforeknown increase.

Earth was calling, but Imp Plus felt for the fingers of the Sun which were his own fingers too. But not his old ones, the ones that came together out of space to join to make a parchment shine of crisscross called the palm of his hand.

New fingers of Sun and himself. Tracts of unknown begun from the widowing of a brain.

Or what came to him as ill body over ill will, known over known he had thought, but not so: for the ill will was not just in how the Solar Energy Project Operation Travel Light had used him out of the goodness of its voice — the ill will had been his own as well. Desire that all that smoke fall back into the Acrid Voice and choke it, and only because the Acrid Voice did not smile upon him like the Good Voice, for whom Imp Plus must have had another and unknown fire of hate.

Desire had met the Sun. The arcs of lumen and glucose lumen wheeled not from Imp Plus and not from the Sun, but from their mingling that was deeper than touch.

Near the bulkhead the dislodged hemisphere stood adrift. When he had seen its segment glimmer in the dark night of the capsule he had recalled a picture of the Earth, and he thought what he saw he hadn’t thought before: that the hemisphere did not heed him.

Earth could go on calling forever.

Earth had woken the Dim Echo.

What Imp Plus saw now in the light of dawn was more than he had seen, and in a spasm at the unfolding premotor cleft he was glad Earth did not know.

Imp Plus saw himself.

8

Him.

He found it on his mouth and in his breath. Him. A thing in all of him. But now he wasn’t sure. He saw he’d felt this him in the brain. But where was it now? In too many centers.

And there was a shifting like the subtraction of a land mass so two or more seas that had been apart now slid together. What happened to this him?

Then it fell away into the damp muscles of light. He saw them from this cleft-fold that had been through so much. Saw with angles of the fold itself. Its angles spread while he looked with them.

Wait.

He did not.

That is, he would not. If he would not wait, did he then go?

He was Imp Plus and had no name before Imp Plus. But he was not a vegetable, In the word of the blind news vendor who had said he would not be just a vegetable.

Imp Plus gave light, though he was no star. His light answered the Sun and came from the Sun. But more, for it went to the Sun too and was a thing Imp Plus did. He was no star but a being that did not look like a star yet was called one. And the earlier shadows of his body on the capsule bulkheads — he knew body—had looked like starlings. The wings and tails, not the motion.

But there had been motion in the shadows. And more than the red glowing at points around the body which he was using to look at the red. He remembered red-cell ghosts; not from the green-and-white blackboard of the Acrid Voice mapping what might be ahead but from his own thought — he had thought about ghost cells with the red missing, for the red breathed. Was it the red glowing here at points?

Starfish. The standing woman had folded herself to bend down to take its sandy arms and legs out of the underwater and he had felt its stiff flesh and put it back in the water. The starfish was hard to see now. He could find it in himself if he tried not to see the motion in his own webbed membrane limbs; but he was no starfish.

He drew parts of his sight out of different, stranded distances, he thought; but he wanted to only after he saw they had come of themselves, yet they were always himself, so he drew. Drew them so that using them together to view window or muscle or cleft-fold he found each was the radius of a color: of diamond-brown (from a membrane-knuckle bent against a bulkhead), of leaning olives (from inside the brain where the old eye ways crossed), or of bare reds (where a sinew of contraction solved the morning Sun): for the radius of a color is not everywhere the same, he saw. It drew these certain parts of his sight together into a point as brief as the space was large that he had once found he could make by division and division when he tried to see between the white gel of a glue (or glial) cell and the twig cells that fired their bud ends from time to time across this divisible space and sometimes split into other twig cells that did not fire but only divided.

This brief point was bright.

A moment in sequence, a sequence so packed it looked like fluid. So grand a moment that for its focal time the different distances came in into the axis of single seeing with a sound: a compound he had not prepared to remember. A host of fluids lengthened into bonds of vibration that slid into so near a body he started to forget he could not rest in its music. But stopped. No. He did not want to rest there, and he would not.

He found he had known music; but this music of his seeing kept the voice of Ground as dim as another frequency. But what he was seeing he saw now he had seen before. Seeing a skin of flesh now, then seeing into some sponge of blond lumen blood, then now seeing clear through what he saw he’d already decided was transparent. These he saw now as before though more clear and with a weight of knowing.

Where was this weight? It was gathering.

But gathering everywhere; that is, spreading.

The weight inclined at all angles, and slid. The slides were of substance, but the weight was separate. The substance could be of granules, with greater space between each the more he desired to see. Granules that were slick rolling masses shifting from outer to inner, he had thought, and inner to outer.

He would not stop the motion to see the wavings of spines joined at their soft, blurred bulb-tips into angles in which a wing came into being to tread a wind of space. But unless he stopped the many motions he might not see this glassy meat, this aerial act, and this whole slow-armed cup whose wing points — whether or not it was when they bumped the bulkheads — then flattened into sides.

With corners.

Which became new tips pointing off as if to do what then they did do.

Which was stretch and stretch the substance of a wing limb till it felt not thinner but the reverse — thicker — and was thicker, and split into two. Which with other twos around himself leaned across.

To make web-folds nothing like the folds of brain which had unfolded as the brain grew what it grew.

But he kept not seeing his body. Was that it? Or kept not seeing it as he thought he ought. Then a dark streak he could see down through showed on its surface a width of slick. So he thought a wing had passed a strip of wind across the streak. But the wings that had not divided into folded arms waved so little they looked still enough to be their own thought.

He was pinned on the end of the axis which was ready to turn like a radius, but now he felt not its pain, only a spray of foamy limbs making him wish to be not there — which was the same as the pain feeling but now was not pain. The axis stuck in him in his midbed: the axis of distance: a windmill stirred the Sun above him: the axis telescoped down close to an ocean: he was aiming at fish: he was the animal end of the axis which was a radius; audible words (not now) spoke of one-celled stuff layered below the sea surface thus causing upon it a slick; the axis was a tube coming up into him in his midbed like wind and the ocean end of this axis of distance he was stuck on had no vegetable news vendor but had vegetable nutrient. Until Imp Plus understood what was happening. Then the axis — which was distance — telescoped out the other way thousands of miles into audible words not of the first voice but of a second which was a woman not of the Mexican night or California beach or the dark woman of the syringe — and the new one was telling how from space fishermen could find what they could never see close up and could drop axis into whole green schoolrooms of plankton, but the first voice was both known to him and not here or now, and struck an unknown through him, for if the second was right the Earth end of the axis of distance was the animal pole and Imp Plus’s end or Imp Plus himself was vegetative; so he said again himself and him.

Whereupon with shifts of sliding substance the grains of lumen and the known pieces of brain now refractions swimming — as if growth were separated travel — in what he’d taken to be the body grown solely from the brain, made it hard for him to hold that first voice that came on the axis of distance. But he held on long enough to see it was the Acrid Voice talking low above an ocean under a mill that stirred the Sun, which he now saw was the kind of wind his body stirred. A solar wind.

This wind in turn laid across the dark streak the width of slick that came and went all around the body. For the streaks were of the same body that stirred the wind to make the slicks, through which when Imp Plus looked he saw motion though not any motion. Also the motion of new crowds of points, bright but as if deflected from brightness, maybe dissolution that was the shadow of a wholeness elsewhere. And because he saw blue darts in the limbs now he saw he gathered several distances into the one stranding of single sight — the gathering of flows into strains that hugged themselves long, then let go then hugged and hugged again till all their songs fell into one resolve: the gathering turned this compound membrane-sight at once back to the still unfolding head of growth, node of nodes, crown of clefts. And this in time to see and feel a wish to have to see a new sliver rise from a lobe bed spraying elbows or grasshopper knees into the Sun’s massing stream. And saw through the now nearly opened and flattened Premotor cleft a raft of once outlying membranes bend up through an arm-join into the brain and, having got in, plow up broadside slowly toward the brain’s gray-amber roof-skin pushing to get out onto it.

While somewhere else in the brain the crimson flashed warm that Imp Plus had seen before only in the outlying bodies.

He had no choice but to go on to understand what was going on. No choice he thought but to be centered and to see out from the brain hub, but then in from the body bonds; see meanwhile from the rounds of tendril bendings up out of cells near an open cleft to those message rounds pressed small in the bulb-bun of branchings at the rear of the brain, to (then) the fine turn of a limb tip finding a nearby limb to join or a bulkhead shine to brush. He thought in the pieces — he did not know how except that the pieces whether refracting in toward a center he hardly had any more or aiming each its own moves separate along a many-sided tissue of inclination were him. So Imp Plus tried to take heed, tried to think — was that it?

But a given focus in its spasms of gathering drew from various distances only some membranes, not all.

And looking sometimes through the brain’s bright work, he wondered why sight-gathering into the focal axis did not take in all membranes, all distances. But he thought the brain was like the body in being not always transparent.

Ground was asking Imp Plus to answer. Ground read maximum power and maximum glucose level, yet read rapid action in cortex. ARE YOU ALERT IMP PLUS? Rapid activity in motor and sensory areas. DO YOU READ IMP PLUS? PLEASE COME IN IMP PLUS. ARE YOU THERE?

He recalled an arm, an eye, a leg. Remembered remembering to remember eyes — just so — sitting with his arms and legs and concentrating on eyes until there was one preparation, then one eye, one eye inside beyond the two eyes he had and would lose. So the shift of beach sand under a wind came to him in each grinding drag of facet over facet, so if he wished he heard the grains of beach as rocks so that with a spasm of distance he could feel that next to the noise in his one recalled ear was a slice of rock sliver along his cheek. And knew he could no more tell Ground about the spasm than the movement of his lost hearing between a billion individual sands each with a noise of rock and the whole rustling shift of the fine beach surface where he lay next to the legs he had been standing against before in the shallows of the water. But if instead of explaining to Ground he wanted to suck or push or reverse one of his outlying limbs back into the brain to touch the red flashings there that had been in the limbs before, the real thing was he did not want to tell Ground.

Not because he did not know if Ground was the Good Voice or the Acrid Voice. Not because the Good Voice had been bad in sending the dune monitor to keep watch on Imp Plus the last weekend. And not because the Acrid Voice had been acrid and alone. The Acrid Voice had said Imp Plus might learn to use the Concentration Loop to talk to himself. Now along the axis of distance in a spasm he did not want, there was a movement near his lost ear, and it went down or up his lost cheek, and after all, he saw with his lost eyes that any motion at that place was on another cheek, the Acrid Voice’s cheek. It opened and there was another cheek that also opened. And below them a sound was seen spreading on the mouth into an Acrid laugh far and away from the woman’s laughter on the beach but laughter too, and shared. But over a distance that wasn’t an axis line. If the axis had ever been a line. But more a distance that was a shape. But as soon as Imp Plus thought that the distance between Acrid Voice’s laugh and woman’s laugh took in a third (which was his own — but then, not now), the distance grew past three to no less than a four-parted shape which would still be the axis of distance because the paining ping or spin or span of distance spasm’d again, Yet not exactly from beyond Imp Plus but from him himself.

But though the Acrid Voice (who was not good but was not bad) might say Imp Plus might learn to talk to himself on the Concentration Loop, he had no time to talk to himself, he must monitor what was happening. That was it, he must monitor what was happening here.

The raft of membrane that Imp Plus had seen come from a limb and bend in around a join between brain and body, then push upward into the brain toward the top of the brain, had grown now right into the surface of the cortex where it lay glistening with the still brighter dot in the middle that made him see all the eyes he had ever seen with their small bright dots in the middle. He saw the membrane — or the membrane was seen — from frond tips of the rising body; but at the same time he saw them themselves at angles like spasms. And seeing that this membrane that had passed from the body to the brain was an eye membrane, he became aware of seeing by means of it not only the now subsiding frond tips (some of these merging like light the plasm of their outlines), but also the changing shades and red and blue glimmers the capsule ceiling gave back as it took and was the warmth of the morning.

And he knew but had no space to think about having once seen this capsule outside and in. Nor had space to hold in his head the Good Voice saying, “Go ahead, feel free to look around, it’s all yours, have a look inside.”

No space except for what was happening.

Except what was happening made less than no space more. He circled up and down, dividing and dividing his sense.

He was free, if not of Ground’s transmissions.

These were like where he had just been and left. And what he was just about to find — if he did or not — was like a gland of light ahead that with the compounds of his sight he saw not right ahead but abeam as he circled up and down.

He saw more than he used. But would not ask for less. His sights moved, and the rear bulb of the brain was seen to be flattening, which should hurt but did not. While from and through this rear, flattening bulb he saw that the tube sections below through the cleft were not of him but outside. And thereupon, his sight-wings pawed round to catch the tubes from outside; his sight angled as if from body membranes at different distances to see what he saw he’d once seen before but without thought. Then as he saw — saw the clear oblong underhousings where two tube roads entered the brain — there was added to what he saw a rush of parts from the brain along one tube clear to the entry point in the housing over the algae beds.

Some of these brain parts were packets of Sun and they glanced everywhere to see their way out of the track of the tube. Or then they were knots staring through a towering headache he didn’t feel. Knots banded into spinning spindles. Which the more he looked were radii. The packets were strands of radii hunting new circles. Packets still of Sun but his Sun and from him, running down the clear canal hung through hills of air.

Down the canal these packets went from one sort to another for he saw they had changed by the time they went in the algae’s houses. And he thought he saw the smallest orbits within orbits crack and re-form — the way the strands of resilience in the corners of his eyes loosened, lost pieces and gaps, and tightened again — yet also the cracking and re-forming orbits within orbits broke when hit by other Sun streams from the Sun outside — the Sun not his own.

Down the canal these were parts of him he was losing to the algae. Like seeing more than he used. But other parts came back up the other tube into the brain’s underhousing inside which a clear disc pumped back and forth the length of the housing, but when he inclined toward closer sight a motion he had not wholly noticed stopped. He had not first wished to incline; the inclining was the wish, and he knew he saw small and large because in being the very thing he saw he both pinned his sight to nerve heads and blew it up in the body of a future idea he felt in him. And the inclining to closer sight went with a halt. Which was a halt among the racing, revolving things in the upward tube so that though they kept revolving they stopped moving up the tube into the brain. But the halt that went with the closer sight and with this halt in the upward tube, was also in another motion: this motion (which, when it halted, Imp Plus’s inclining sight could see only by recall) was a breath of cycle, and its halting made the brain and the body for a moment look equal in substance and simultaneous: and the breathlike cycle which waited briefly when Imp Plus inclined toward this closer sight and resumed when he stopped inclining, was the palm of brain swelling to lift the fingers of body, then the brain subsiding and spreading and the body merging its members and showing in transparencies of density what Imp Plus had gone on to know: that all over was a drift of substance. A shift.

Of bends and bundles and bonds. So in three, four, five, or more limb bodies that extended from the brain’s hub could be seen now what had been only (he thought) in the brain before: snowy glial cells glue-mouthing branches that grew out of twigs firing and not firing and tonguing with a light that twisted free while binding its own loin of freedom: whereas in the old brain were to be seen now what had been in the limbs before: strips of cloudy membrane adrift and wiggling near the olive fibers of the optic ways. Then up near the cerebrum’s curved and lowering roof (he knew the word — the word roof? the word curved? no: cerebrum—it came echoing in to him) two translucent spines he knew had once been part of an outlying limb’s outline slid along a sight membrane likewise here in the cerebrum visiting from the limbs — until the trough or streambed of membrane curled lengthways to cup or wrap the spine; and for an instant of desire he saw this spine so whole it grew into the membrane. And thus wrapped, they swerved away from the lowering roofs of the brain until they found and leaned into the tendrils lengthening from the smell bulbs one of which now was drawn with its tract away from its root near the optic tracts and from what had been the brain’s core toward the probe of a new body approaching like an empty arm. And he saw this was a limb, a body limb, coming inside by reversing itself inside out leaving the outer reaches of the capsule and peeling a mouth open and turning itself inside out into a side area of the brain. And when a sliver popped from a fore area and Ground asked what was the story and asked again and again if Imp Plus detected outside influence, he let the Dim Echo answer that an exploratory probe had entered a lower left association area.

At this instant the crimson flash occurred near the core, and the thumb or head of the inside-out limb threw out a luminous emptiness to touch that red and instead drew from the core one of the small island bodies located above the gland of flame, and retracted this island body out into itself; And then into the outer area of the capsule — for the limb rebodied itself and lay out, wing or spoke, toward the shining gray bulkheads where the blue-mottled pearl of the hemisphere hung adrift, and Imp Plus had desired the limb to do this.

He had desired that one of his limb bodies suck itself into the brain to catch the crimson flashings that he had used to see in the outlying parts and that seemed to have been supplanted out there by the blue darts that had once been in the body of the brain.

Red and near-blue neared and fell back somewhere under where the islands of the core stood afloat, those that were left after the two had been sucked out into the long substances of outlying body which he could no longer call body. A thing he thought must be a thought was coming to him. It came also from him. It was a sight, too. Not the sight he now saw he wanted to get away from into doing. No, not that sight. Yet that kind of sight he would not get around. So he thought he would stop trying to get around it. It was kind of how he focused. What kind? He knew but must say. To say, he must start, but this could never be the start, for he could never see or have seen the start. He could go on, only, and in pieces, pieces that did for him, or, that is, pieces that would do. But as he did, he felt divided and redoubled into several places of himself, inside and out. How did he focus? There wasn’t one center. He gathered himself to see the algae beds and other plant tests he now saw he had lived with but not thought of. And he gathered himself to see now the radius-spindles of his own changing Sun flow down the tube from that underhouse near what had been the bun or little brain. He gathered himself as suddenly to see sight membranes that had gone from the limbs into the cerebrum and grown or ranged to the top, and the membrane that had the gray-glittering point in the middle. Gathered himself to see among the limb bodies now armed with substance parts of the brain lean toward focus.

And he gathered, or came to feel, that the gathering of different distances into focus was like the muscle pricks of spasm-flows of charge. So at each moment of sight on some tip end of growing, his sight would be a center, or not a center, or lead toward the thing seen and draw other membrane-eyes after it all angling toward the thing to be seen, angling even through all the bodies inside what had been the brain for they could be transparent or not. At will, if not his. He found that many things at once were his — but to see or think. And when it came to saying, why he could not say many things at once. And if like an old lost center he gathered, was it just because the pieces, some of them, consented?

The limb body that had sucked away the two islands from above the gland of flame and resleeved out into the capsule’s space had now for the time being merged with bodies on either side, and the islands were not to be seen. The brain and what layout beyond felt more one. The dividing went on, but he had gotten used to the pain which was like the old sense of blood running around his body.

Now a limb body reached the window, for he thought he had long wanted to. The sprout tip tried the thick waters of the glass which he could nonetheless also see was so easy to see through it was like an absence of obstacle, so the Sun’s touch on the plant beds could work itself through without any shifting net of impurity. But water was not thick. He knew water. There was water here, but not a sea.

His sprout tip seemed at the aching instant before it bumped the glass to fold inward to make a suction cave. From the several other distances (which were membranes) from which he saw this event, the frond of himself waved and headed its snout toward the window lengthening.

Moving what it was already.

But somewhere lengthening, though through the flesh of its skin that got harder to see through in the morning light.

It moved. But also grew.

Both.

And in some compound he did not know except it was his.

Yes, he had wanted to move to the window. The going part, the frond or limb, he came to see in its fine growing light of outline and its shifting substance, was a fresh beginning. So were the others. Alone or when they joined to be bowl-sides exhaled from a floor that was what had been the brain.

But if some of those islands now more than two that had been (by him himself) sucked from the brain core had flowed away into what he’d once thought the new body or bodies, and if tendrils and nerve-twig firings and snowy glues and other matter and what had been centers had shifted from brain to bodies, surely the gland of flame stayed.

And near it the blocks of cells in which were plugged fibers — color-coded, he thought, though saw only olive; and under these two blocks all those radiant areas he had left alone in double distance of red and violet, left alone like the gland of flame or glimmer, while looking so closely at the block of fiber-plugged connections near the optic tracts that he had missed, or desired to miss, a salt-sweetness of connection so plain he tried to turn away from it to see if the Dim Echo knew the right words for it, for each block of plugged-in fibers was a layered depth of what elsewhere he had sighted in a cup so membrane-thin he felt it now as a flat map. But he had no right, for each of the two cups plugged point-for-point to the two layered depths could not be his own and must be hers, the woman at the beach, and each flat-spread map was a cup-curved thinness a part of him could not call the retina.

And ahead he understood that he had called for the Dim Echo to give him that word, but had found only the word itself, retina, not the Dim Echo, and not any word for the block of plugged-in fibers, color-coded he heard more than saw — and he heard again the words What happens to the brain’s three-dimensional map of the retina when there is no more retina to send to? And he felt an arm and a leg sitting in him folded so he could concentrate on the retina question, concentrated until there were two retinas, the second outside of him and invisible and an idea — a prepared memory, was that it? That had been it.

But the question had preceded the memory. The question came from Earth, but not now.

Who had asked it?

He would look out the window his limb body had reached for. For in his bones he felt that all he saw here in himself was just what he had prepared to see.

He used the small, insucked tuck at the tip of this body to suction the tip onto the glass, and he arched this limb body toward where the bulkhead curved into overhead. So doing, he saw that he made the move he felt and he felt what he’d wanted to feel: the cave-in of growth, the very cave of growth. So when he saw out the window by training his milky membrane, a thought spread and he gave himself the feeling of turning, for he thought he wanted to find that thought in its full whereabouts. But found instead that he wanted to breathe himself into sleep, to sleep — and found that he had not been equal to the thought which had occurred in all his substance.

So out the window he saw what was inside. For he had to face eyes. Eyes before seeing. Eyes not of sight but of red and violet: firing in the double-deeps radiating below the fiber-plugged bodies but with each firing wink spreading (he thought) quick shades through all the cortex. Eyes he must face for they were not hers, but his. Yet not his but the absence of his. Which he had known all along. But without following the optic fibers where they diverged from the disused tracts because there were no eyes to home on.

Looking back, now, from the window, Imp Plus found more Sun. It swam as on other days and in other weeks and over months, swam in itself, but no more through the same brain and body.

How many days Imp Plus did not know, but knew one day was light, another light and dark.

He would not ask Ground how long the project had gone on.

Ground did not know how glucose held at maximum.

Ground could not see the radiating red and violet below the fiber plugs.

Ground took away.

Imp Plus saw the substance in the brain and in the outlying bodies shrug, and Imp Plus had recalled shoulders spoken of, but did not tell when he had recalled shoulders, before or after the big shrug of substance. Looking close he could not see the big shrug, and the breath cycle hung unmoving and in that moment of equals between brain and body which he could not call brain and body any more, Imp Plus out ahead of himself knew Ground would take away the radiations, stake out the new-found optic membranes, tick off the limb-bound islands lost.

Islands of the limbs, but how long among the shifts of substance could true islands stay limb-lost? Limbic, for short. But Imp Plus had not thought up limbic; it had come out to him; and not from Ground.

But through parts so empty he tried to look down at himself in a way he therefore now recalled. From head to toes, down curves of his old body, its curves that tried to come up to him but must keep their distance. Yet now there was no point in the memory, and what there was of him he saw from many equal points or slides of membrane which dilated as he used them so that the old body came back to him but in the shape of distance increasing for which there was a word discomfort that came out to him but not from Ground. The word came in a voice once his though now just pulses on a frequency reaching further and further back to Earth, for that was the Ground where his body was except a piece which he must call brain but was a piece of body blown off up the tube and axis and distance of distance where the curves of his chest would not return to him nor his chest hairs like fingers, fingers in the Sun if he could only stop but he could not. Distance where the curves of chest were as free of him as of sutures, and curves of stomach so flat he could almost not see its good shape though it was not good like the Good Voice and was even bad because ill though even then dividing into an unknown. Distances dividing down faint dual troughs of belly that were not those lighted bellies of the brain now stretched like limbs seeking to become their source. Bellies curving in along beside suddenly much more hair which also was not fingers but then became fingers with blood red that loved him, someone else’s fingers: and up at the final spinning end of that exploded axis which became then fixed as the axis of distance, he knew the voice; and the voice was his, steadily giving information back like a terminally stranded astronaut to Ground that some future sense dimly present then told him was not his Ground now: but there amid the multiplying distances of the launch, the launch, it was his voice that reported to Ground discomfort—the voice Imp Plus now light-years later heard signal inside him discomfort, so in retort to the Dim Echo’s prepared word discomfort (for it was the Dim Echo), he said: pain, sad, alone, distance.

And the Dim Echo in a sigh it could not have wanted to make at the time of the launch where there had been no separation between a well-drilled Dim Echo answering to the name Imp Plus, and what had here come to be a new Imp Plus, observed that light-years was wrong, for the distance was that of a synchronous Earth orbit 22,300 miles from Ground.

But the sigh Imp Plus then saw was silent, and the information was unsaid. Likewise information he’d not known he had: that the on-board dilatometer measured expansion due to heat; that the Concentration Loop communicated from conscious brain to Ground by electrodes; that limbic was a system in the core that was connected to the nerve bodies of the hypothalamus.

Wait.

He would not stop for these packets of Ground-bound data banked into him by Dim Echo. They brought Ground back to him probing for why glucose held at maximum and whether connection between water gauge and water had stopped working, for water must be much lower than Ground’s reading.

Imp Plus did not want to know.

But as he recalled the Good Voice’s “Go ahead, feel free to look around, it’s all yours,” he found himself gathering, like the gatherings of his multi-membrane microsight, that the island bodies that had been sucked from the brain into the limbs were parts of the hypothalamus, and that the wildly glancing knots or packets of his own sun spindling down the tube from brain to algae were units of radiance. He knew radiance, but not he felt from the Dim Echo. And he gathered also that the other brainward tube was for nourishment. And looking for the now flattened brain the cerebrum (which then swelled a bit as he looked but not back into the cerebral wig-shape) and looking, too, for the flattened little brain the cerebellum behind, he felt the Dim Echo separate inside him and make him like a memory wonder if the body he had grown unhelped by Ground was the conscious brain’s opposite.

But no — he found substance not mainly different from substance beyond, he found centers but no center; new fields of streaming points slid or deflected everywhere dissolving some one dark source into bright shadows; his body-probe thumbing the window glass smelled sea sands running through a salt-sweet porous hand which was her hand. He found the flaming gland still where it had been, but its glimmer dispersed into all of him, and not only the breathing motion which was himself expanding and contracting, but a tide of equally growing inclination spread all over with each motion of his breath.

But more than breath, and here was almost the thought he had not been equal to before. It was a thought he inclined toward but it had been in him always and he must think it. So he looked at the radiation units that spun into radii for the algae gases to embrace. And he looked both near the gland of flame and at the pearly hemisphere adrift at a bulkhead, and seeing at the same time blue dart and crimson flash about his shifting substance, he saw Ground’s words make a mouth on Earth: and when Imp Plus wished Ground to vanish, his sight blew a hole in itself and shot up to hang by no thread, and was a sliver. Which he saw was an electrode that had been the gray glinting button in the middle of the very sight membrane which itself had worked and mulled its way up into the scalp of the brain and thus skewered itself.

He inclined toward the thought he must think by looking at several things at once which he had been able to do before, for his sight was multi and micro and threatened to be too powerful to help and must be limited. Ground was silent as Imp Plus inclined toward the thought he thought he could now handle. Imp Plus’s just digested Dim Echo helped him project pulses into the Concentration Loop to test Ground on the red and the blue that the Dim Echo did not answer. But Ground did not either.

In the silence, Imp Plus could handle the hemisphere by lengthening himself and by moving himself. But as he moved from where he’d smelled the window, the cave-crash pain was worse than before; for on an axis of distance and of vegetable and animal, he had been grinding a mesh of wheels of teeth — ground the mesh away into a dust which he must then save by breathing.

And choking, and lightly tapping the hemisphere with the part of him that could smell and could thumb, he was able to handle that thought.

That before had turned him from the window.

Like a drawing in of all his sense.

Here.

He was glad Ground was through. Glad that after reaching orbit he had sprung his own housing. For that was what the cloud-blue-mottled hemisphere was. The safe housing over what had been the brain.

The thought he could handle now was more cause to cut Ground off. For Ground would use him. Use even the thought.

Which was that with the help of the Sun he could think his own growth.

9

He stood away from this thought. It came over him everywhere. Newer parts of him nudged each other’s outlines of light and sometimes joined. So he was not just increasing.

He could become less, when two skins of lumen inclined together and were one skin and then this filament between dissolved. He stood away from the great thought that he had thought. But it had settled over him and covered him. So he rid himself of it by letting it do what it would do. So it was falling as slowly as snow once had seemed to fall, lowering so slowly he took long to see that its slow movement was also a lifting. From below, a lifting up but not away.

He stood away, he thought, from this thought: the thought that he could think his own growth. But he found it all around, growth and thought, thought and growth, it opened and was close and he felt it was himself but felt it was less.

But still he stood away. He had to.

Sometime he had said the words sad and alone, but he did not know them and wondered if he could think them onto him but wondered where they were stored if he could recall.

He stood away from the thought that he could think his own growth.

How could he have choked on the dust those axes had ground? For he had nothing to choke with. No head and neck — for that was where choking choked. Blue in the face. Yet heads had eyes that saw. And he saw.

He saw the thought of his own growth risen and fallen, land and lift.

But he stood away from it. He tried to know it was there and done by him. But to stand or be away he found himself thinking again why choked. What did choke mean? He had nothing to choke with. Still there was what was choked on: for he saw that where his tucked frond tip thumbed and smelled the window, the window shifted and poured and dropped the sands it was made of, dropped them into blue morning space. Meanwhile, at the same time, so easily he thought what was the use, the slow-flaming gland that was a last centering sign of what had been the brain now bulbed its flux up over the dulled tints of the optic tracts and their crossing.

All of a sudden the gland’s force had flooded and slowed the wheeling Sunbraids of the midday cells. So Imp Plus found no point to this ease of the gland’s power. At the same time the wings or spoke-fronds had paused in their many forms, and one was now grown into and through what had been a main land and luminous reservoir of what had been the cerebrum: so this wing or neck at this moment of sluggish halt was a body of bridge pinning or belting a lower cross-lamina of substance illumined in turn by the two glancing tubes that entered the underhousing where the disc pump was. But the tubes’ streams brainward or for that matter plantward barely moved now, any more than the other reaches of flesh, pinions, outline, or fronds of him moved. And the dropping of the sands to clear the window glass joined the stubborn glimmering gland’s pointless force thickening impedance, and joined the gathering fixity of his unengaged new being’s range of differences to think as if for him; and he choked.

He knew choked but not what it meant, so he could not choke on the word, but he choked.

On an absence.

Though choked not on that old absence of obstacle which was how the impulses had once come on the frequency from Earth. Choked now on an absence that was obstacle.

Absence he didn’t want, which swelled him into glut.

What did?

While what he saw despite some need to stop using ultrasight was the reverse of swelling. It was shrinking he would incline to act on. For he was choking without knowing what choking was. But was disinclined, except to be.

So through all the milky smoke of the great thought fallen, risen, standing dispersed, the Sun’s flow made the only move. Or almost only: for, disinclined to act, Imp Plus yet inclined the other way, and when the Sun then grew less light Imp Plus knew this could not be the Sun itself, not the great hand withdrawing; for the glial cells and neurons — he knew neurons — and those other cells by some offsprung reversal like the neurons’ earlier selves unfiring but able to divide — had all been at their midday. For he had thought so. And since therefore the Sun had all the time from noontide yet to flow, the lessening light was due to Imp Plus not the Sun.

Imp Plus inclined to sleep. An early night was sliding across the slowed flood of Sun. Was what he choked on light that was forced to stand slower and slower?

For he choked. And what swelled, and swelled toward sleep, mixed him richer he felt and richer as the slowed and long-standing light enfolded and embraced him so he breathed its gas forever but stopped.

But stopped and stopped.

For he could not breathe; for what lung had he to breathe with?

But it did not take a lung to look, he thought: for, looking closer through the light that clearly he could not breathe, he saw the shrinking all over lean out of itself to swell like breath drawn in. That is, he swelled a bit but felt less choked. But then he was back where he began. Yet, having looked, seemed to breathe when he looked again out of his inclination to sleep; and in the great milky suspension which was the thought of his own growth, he saw parts larger than any the milky suspension had held when he’d first seen it occupy him like a shade. But the sizes were not all the same. He saw that the larger ones were made of smaller, and as he looked these smaller stopped avoiding one another and leaned suddenly together, split their flowing shells, and stuck and joined.

Elsewhere, remembering that looking made him breathe which meant he did not choke, braids of the Sun spindled their light; and particles of the milky smoke rebounded from each other without hitting; and larger particles — he knew blast—blasted back into smaller.

And Imp Plus swelled and inclined also to shrink and swell or shrink again, and crowds of off-blasted particles of particles slid back together, and the spindling Sun slowed.

Imp Plus saw that no, it was just because he could breathe that he could choke. But because he could choke he could sleep, which was — wasn’t it? — one more inclining among inclinings. But choke was sleep, sleep was night, night not see. Since see and look were both sight, hence in part the same, and look made him breathe, and he could not choke if he could not breathe — why he must look.

Which meant he must not sleep.

Though look was not see. And the big and small particles were undecided to gather or disperse.

Which were two inclinings among inclinings. Inclinings flooded by a slow-flaming gland that seemed like his sight unlimited.

And if joined like the microsight beyond the capsule into that length of blue afternoon space where somewhere some cloudy blue-mottled Ground hung like a preserved gland, then also connected to the sweet watering of some body’s eye feeding Imp Plus on the pulse of its color contracted across a pupil gap by rings of muscle celled like an Orbital Monitoring Station experiment able to change size.

Divided, Imp Plus in one dilated membrane heard the voice that said “Vanity” say “Glad I didn’t pack a bag.” He choked back something lost. And in another contracted membrane heard, with a pulse choke-bombing up and down his glorying head, a voice say, “But what would be the advantage of a capsule that could change size?” The same voice he also smelled saying (and so acrid that Imp Plus wanted to toss his head this way and that to get out of a chamber of chalk dust choking him), “The brain can signal lack of sugar but not lack of oxygen, so we’ll watch you for any accumulation of CO_2.” The words were hard to wait for. He was choking even if he had no brain now but instead neck after neck unheaded and unlike a neck he had once prepared to save. Or had the operation at the last moment reversed the plan and saved the body not the brain?

He choked through the velvety waters of eyes whose enticing mesh was lost for good; he choked through the voice’s words Travel light. He choked through a last grind of disintegrating teeth meshed on an axis between axles — that was it. A grinding dividing of ill body by ill will: he saw it in the capsule window like the reticle they had left out — he saw

fade into the clear glass and recalled only the grinding dividing of ill body by ill will, geared through soft sand and hard road to outdistance the dune watcher gearing his overdrive: but away for what? to find all through the towering headaches of that last weekend body over will in constant mesh of want driving back to the Project called Travel Light only as it had become his own secret will over the body from which that willed secret was to be divided.

Back at the end of the weekend, then, to the secret field of growth, Imp Plus had choked as if he hadn’t meant to on those words accumulation of CO_2. And now on the O that was all around him. And in him. But bonded into absence.

And now new-grown but standing away toward sleep, he knew only that he’d choke if he didn’t do one more thing. But then another. Many. That was it. Do them quick or else.

And in the midst of the great gland’s bomb that like his multi-microsight seemed boundless and therefore unengaged, he found it also not like his sight; for the gland could not have focus: if not in where it went at least a reverse focus in its source. For the gland sent its omnifluence out from the same old center of what had been but was not now the brain.

Yet more: this difference between gland and sight turned Imp Plus like breathing to and from the gland and its field of himself. Back or forth past the optic crossing. There discolor had now long turned nearby fibers palest olive. But been turned to pinwheels of radii so many he would not see with his sight for a moment that the wheels lacked rims and the radiant spokes of so many lengths extended many colors fixed for a passing moment upon the axle points of the pinwheels but then shot off like stalks pulled up or like long low animals with plates instead of membranes sliding into water, the waters of all the fields of flood.

Seeing that the strange words radii of color were true, he could not stop to know why.

For the difference he had found between great gland and multi-sight turned Imp Plus to a new difference. It was in the spindling Sunbraids of what had been the midday cells now midafternoon. What he saw in the slowed Sunbraids looked caused by the light of the milky standing smoke of his great thought but also making that blinding curdle and sponge of light as ultramicron particles give up the spring of their meshes and slick frameworks. How did he know ultramicrons? What he saw was that those reverse-magnet Sunbraids raying off out into the fields of his space were braids of two Suns not one.

And the new one was sun from him. His own.

Sun that was him.

He’d seen it in pieces and in waves longer than Ground’s but shorter than the long elbows and sailing legbones which were the great Sun’s rays, some greater some less, both greater than his own one kind.

Which they fit — and in a wonderful braid of angles that gave him for one last moment a darkening ratio of known body over known body and body under body under the eyes of the dune: so for that moment that he would know was his last and most enticing choke, he recalled her warm waves and his, free and loose together as if those bodies were not lost to him always.

Thereupon he knew what then he saw he had tried to know before. This thought took effect before he knew it, and the effect was a sourceless jolt that turned him like unfolding him nearside far, or like a thought that was his charge to learn. It ran through the thickening gel and blew the ultramicrons out with a crash the reverse of crash so they hung again dispersed in springy nets of mesh. And the Sunbraids and floods of Sun moved again, though Imp Plus was given pause by knowing what had caused the change of charge. For that was what it was, a change of charge.

And the cause was the jolt which was a thought.

The thought that not only could he think his own growth, he must.

Yet did not his changing limbs think him?

But the pause was a way of speaking, a dim sound of how someone once had spoken. Or how a thing had grown a name.

And now so much flowed from the new state, he could only think he must try to know what he knew. Silver lines — two — drew his thought; but not yet, for now he would think only about the Sun tubes. The tubes moved again, or what was along them. He was breathing.

The things in the tubes differed.

Knot-packets of double-Sun were not all that now raced down from his clear underhousing to the plant beds. What was not the packets was streams of another. Points within points that held each other off but did not defend against his reaming sight. Which came very close or not. Depending on what, he did not know. This lack of limit was not good. He went close, or brought the tubes to him, but did not know what was to be done with what he found.

For it made him think of himself. Of constant mesh gears on a seashore road. And he would not go back into that rich mixture that choked him into liking to be choked. But this time inclining toward the currents in the tubes, he would not think beyond them to what he had once thought was a thought he could handle. (He did not know handle.)

So for a time he saw only what he saw. Points of orbits within orbits. But one point or body of space repeated. And the unit was one smaller shell of orbits held — how? — between two slightly and equally larger shells of orbits to make a lot of empty space into a tight whole of spinning cross-orbits, in which the fastest of the bodies in the orbits stayed closer to the two larger shells than to the middle smaller shell yet so that all three bodies made one.

He followed both tubes at the same time. He liked this mere twofold motion more than the myriad radii his sight if he chose could bring to bear. For he thought of two eyes once and how their lines met always at a point you could see, like a line of chalk becoming an ellipse or bright pale teeth lighting the moist loin of mouth coming close to the focus of his mouth.

But he mustn’t think that way, he must see what was here: that the upward tube from the plant beds into his own being brought back only part of each body he’d seen flashing down the plantward tube: the outer parts or orbiting orbits, not the smaller shell of orbits in between: so the smaller stayed in the plant beds, and the larger came back: and if when the upward tube stopped flowing he choked, then the upward brought something to breathe: which did not mean that the slightly smaller in-between orbit left in the plant beds was not to breathe, though he did not know.

He had said ultramicrons. He had known.

From the Dim Echo now absorbed.

Or from what the Dim Echo had known from. From Earth once. Fences once — that was it — fences around ultramicrons, or of them. The ultramicrons were all the particles of his thought, his great thought from which by a slight change of charge from could to must he had now moved on, but which had dispersed suspended and at a point had gelled toward choking thickness till he had reversed the charge and reversed the feeling the particles had for one another: so instead now they held apart, and this dispersed suspension faded into his being — neither up nor down nor back — and was seen no more. But what did the word ultramicrons do?

Ultraviolet he knew from the Dim Echo, but the word was albedo, and he’d been briefed to recall it; albedo was being measured by Operation TL. But albedo was a cover. Camouflage, said the Good Voice. And ultraviolet was not only from the Dim Echo, it was from the Good Voice’s briefings, and it was from the Sun and they had said you could not see it or the D that, beyond Earth’s envelope, its angstroms might help to bring — angstroms were not langleys much less henrys — Imp Plus recalled remembering langleys by the dozen — and if the ultraviolet was from the braid-bright Sun, the D was not Dim, but if ultraviolet came like thought in ultramicrons, Imp Plus could see it and maybe had seen it.

Which Ground for all its monitoring would not know. But Ground was not monitoring now. Or if monitoring, not by Concentration Loop. Which Imp Plus had popped from one or more folds. Though which of the hanging slivers with their incoming waves rooted the Concentration Loop Imp Plus didn’t need to know.

But then, from the window he had touched without seeing out of, like a sheer dream of the changing neck or limb that touched it, he saw now back over the whole capsule. He saw what he had been becoming. He remembered not understanding time. He looked away again at the window that he did not want to look through. Then names for his parts came to him, and he looked back on himself where he saw still more time. For the crimson that flashed in brief veins that he had begun to see all over himself during the shifts of substance and that flashed in the warm of the day not much at night, he now saw in the darker reach of the bridge body that wound layers across one warp of what had been the brain. This sharp crimson flash reminded him he had not been seeing crimson flashes much now. And seeing this was so, Imp Plus though wending elsewhere to two silver lines he could not place found a moment of many crimson flashes everywhere over himself.

Which was the same, he now saw, as the spread feeling of his great thought of growth just before it became particles rising and falling in solution that from free coequal spread changed toward gel. He knew gel, just as he had thought he would be able to handle that great thought of growth. But as he saw the crimson flash equally over all of him equalling the thought that in fact he had not been seeing the crimson, he saw too that the one crimson that suddenly veined in the bridge end had been so sharp because it was in shadow — the shadow himself against the window that was between himself and Sun. But when he bent away removing the shadow and felt the cell nets of that warp dilate — which was what he felt was warmth — the crimson did not flash.

He looked more and at last he did not see, for the seeing membranes dilated. So he thought this close looking had made centers in each of them like the skewering electrode, and each center had dilated.

No: that is, he saw into the flesh of motion and elastic reticles of cells, and closer still: so a new, delimited aim aisled out, and he found himself falling as if he had been able to see the future by looking so close at the flesh of cell walls; and at that moment he found the fall as cramping in its plummet as the choking had richly been before, and he felt wrenched and yanked back on the end of an elastic sleeve or eye string he then would not look for.

And the pain reminded him.

But of what?

That he was in a bath of elastic. Elastic skin made for him. And the pain reminded him of cave-crash and himself — though him he was not sure of and would not seek.

He was reminded of the cave-crash, the stretching over an emptiness he did not know till he had passed it and had seen he’d brought it into being to fill it so he saw what he had not been able to do when he had stared his microsight so deep into his substance he reached past depth into potential. Saw what he had not been able to do. Saw because the enticing aisle offered to fall him into all final possibility. Saw also because parts here in this capsule, parts he needled his sight into, parts whose stuff was fired by braids of his and his Sun’s radiance, had peeled him from himself. Microsight had more power than he had known. It held him. The brown fingers with a gold ring peeled a sleeve back to put in a point. A syringe. But here in space he it was who had done the job, nobody else.

Which was to penetrate — he must (he saw he must) say what he’d done — peel and penetrate through microsight to such infinitesimal interiors of himself that he’d turned himself away from the whole thing he now was.

Had he wanted to see it so?

Looking, he did not know what to say. He had more than stretched and prodded the elastic skin the Project had designed to wrap him; he had turned it out of itself. The sheen he had now was not that skin that Project TL had fitted to him. That skin had melted into him.

Looking, he did not know what to say of the whole thing he saw he was, whose seeing he also was.

Where once there had been four wendings or faldoreams or shearows or morphogens, division had made many, and many one. What he had to see was that its only firm center was what went round it: the capsule sphere. This arc was joined to the plant-tube housing under what had once been the brain by two thickly silver-insulated wires running from an oblong box fixed at a place up the capsule bulkhead opposite the window beside which Imp Plus had now tried to station and confine his sight. What were wendings, faldoreams, shearows, morphogens?

Four kinds of his body and himself.

Words remembering other words, but new words for what he had become.

He watched his rims soften and rise all together to hold: but with nothing to hold, he thought: but as he thought this, the one great rim of substance humped into several oval holdings.

An amber-scaled shearow leapt up his being yet left its nether extension where it had come from; and he saw that this shearow, which had the drape-drop cover-lap edges and nightlike transparency of the faldoream it had once been, leapt across to the bulkhead to listen at the box where the heavy-wrapped wires came from. A control box.

But if wendings were now one, Imp Plus found by bounding a morphogen off either end of an axis visible in one part of the wending, that the wending had once been many and in some way still was. Many what? He felt he could not say, for see was the need or effect of say: many ports. But three, four, or many wendings had turned into their own motion.

He had to see his being only as it was now; for in the rise and fall of its glassy sheen of meat, making a wave of itself round or then across and back in every circuit, spiral, or skew of flowing interruption and many a skew he did not know until then in the fall or rise he knew he’d been prepared, he found himself full of what had been.

That is, where field had found a way to be a reach, or reach had found a way to know its difference from bulkhead, skin, or radiance it touched, and thus leaned its axis athwart itself to go sideways to join a reach so the reach was suddenly apt to burst and take and be its own neighbor plasm, he saw what a remembrance of caving burn and blood crack disinclined him to see.

He saw the previous leaning that had been present enough to grow into itself. And seeing this not distant past — the earlier tendings and extendings, the dark red or pale green ripples more gradient than motion, the turning of nets of micro-orbits of surface into silk films to see the Sun, yet cloudy silks to slow it — Imp Plus must incline away from the moment of those near memories; for they offered to slide him right down the axis of distance into all the shapes of Earth that could not be his now and would choke him in the words they threw up to him, shadows of what he saw and was and what he meant now instead to see and be, here in itself — that is, apart from Earth.

So limbs by inclination spread to others sideways and were not limbs. So such joined and thus disapparent bodies saw their way clear then to spread their membranes over across a body that had seemed to think itself equidistant from all the capsule. So more could seem less, in the reach of co-motion — only then to break its reply to the Sun’s radiation into all lengths of wave: so that along the membranes’ long reds, brief blues and violets, or medium greens but stranger also medium golds that were also everywhere, the one fastness of sight thus divided yielded all frequencies.

But frequencies of what, he was not sure.

A crimson vein came and went so fast it mapped a spiral and so fast the seeming spiral looked like two, and others in synchronous fields or seeming trains of ahead-thrown need approached what then seemed right to have approached. It was not growth so much as movement. Not a move so much as gradient inclination.

The shapes of the breathings round and round changed but continued, continued to change.

He did not add to himself as before.

Except to find that when a larger breath and a glutting web among many passing limbs crowded the arc of the capsule bulkhead to smell the acrid society of their thought, a contraction was always possible which was as much growth as were all those addings.

Which had gone with cave-crash and vein-flashes of crimson.

But now with more change than adding and more motion than change, the crimson continued in the bright heart of the late day which was many days, and, now Imp Plus came to think of it, the crimson died down at night when cold came, or Ground said it came. But what was cold?

A flank — the only flank and with new pores of moisture — the only flank for the moment (having been a wing, a neck, a finger of nose) — curled now about one plant bed assuming the oblong angles of the housing. And for that moment of brown shadow Imp Plus saw a shiver of coiling under the milky orange membrane and felt in his whole being the plant bed’s partial loss of Sun. But he felt it in the nesting curl of the shivering sweet smell of the coiling which was laughter he remembered up a spine he did not have.

And from the humor of this gland-warm, shade-chilled hug of a giant Micronesian clam fed unseeing by the hunger of light-hungry algae growing inside it, Imp Plus chose to recoil. But before he could do so, he saw the limb of himself not in the plastic housing which he was touching but in some substance below in the beds. What was it?

Yet the flank or limb slowed into orange-red like the optic crossing’s sometime glimmer, and the flank removed itself from around the clear housing so slowly Imp Plus found that this was what he had wanted.

To have the laugh at the giant clam fed by its own tongue of garden? Yet thus slide down the rains of distance not to Micronesian seas containing a blue-green recovery area, but to shearwater shores he could not reach.

He had another answer. The shiver of brown over the test beds. Shaded into chill by his flank. The shiver itself, yes, tested by the very slowness of his removal. Tested to see if the shiver of chill in these particular beds of algae had been really where he had thought.

The tubes between himself and the algae shone with action.

That must not stop.

Plantward in one tube ran two kinds from himself: first, the spinning units each one a small shell of micro-orbits held between two equally larger shells of micro-orbits; and second, the spindles — spindles spun of glancing knots radiating sun.

Sun he’d first thought glanced wildly because it was the great Sun caught in the tube track, then later because it was his own sun radiating force against its vegetable journey; but now Imp Plus saw the spindles were his own sun bombing the clear canal of plantward tube to rebraid with the lost joints of Sun quanta, and then he found that in the race plantward some spindle-radii did draw the other Sun into the tube track to rebraid, while some did this upon reaching the plants, and some others of the red and amber-gold spindle-radii of his myriad did not rebraid but, reaching the plant beds, hit the algae in a spray, shredding green and light from the damp plants into circles he had not seen till now and did not want to stop to dwell on.

Except to see that the red and amber-gold frequencies of this sun of his had been for a long time observable across the growing dispersion of the once-fiery gland’s once-central glow.

He did not care.

The thought came all of a sudden.

So much so that the motions of the wendings increased to a steady spiral as if speed changed kind. Then he did not care.

But the spiral oscillated. The thought of this colored its cause like a radius sweeping and fading, sweeping, fading, so that seeing himself whole he could say he was alone, and hence did not care for connections. Ground would say, “It looks like a starfish becoming a rainbow shoe, a featherless bird becoming a gland, a body becoming an orbit.” But Ground would not know what had happened.

The Acrid Voice had argued against video monitors inside the capsule.

Imp Plus did not care. They had wanted a life form to support, that they could afford to lose. A brain becoming information.

He and the silent Sun had folded to fool them, was that it? He did not care but could not rest. What he saw here had caused him pain.

Had cost him.

He let his sight multiply. So an amber-scaled shearow in its peninsular leap paused, or seemed to pause, in mid-reach and drooped long margins of blue tissue that returned to the more sluggish and productive faldoreams like neurons to their earlier selves, while morphogens bounding onto, but up from, the axes of the wendings touched shearow-leaps and faldoream-causeways to draw them among the wendings.

And the wendings in the solid of their spiral up and down yet as well under the full reach of multi-sight that Imp Plus relented into, gathered radiance of motion into a fixity like his own orbit: or, beyond his orbit, a possibility he wanted not to think of.

Wanted not to think of.

Was what he was. For Ground, for Project Travel Light, for the Good Voice.

Wanted, he had been. So then they would not have to think of him. Which led to a possibility he wanted not to think of.

Wanted not to think of.

But think or not, he had to see what now went on. Why had he to see, why attend? Words stalled into opposition, and his substance could have become morphogens freed from the axial plasm of the wendings, for he almost saw himself — itself a changing thought — wholly parted into all possible parts, divisor and dividend.

But only almost — or was that it? — for what had now been going on looked a power of “almost.”

For ultrapoints stood each other everywhere swirling but not meeting. Fields of points. Imp Plus knew field. Fields leaned together like planes of chances but the ultrapoints did not touch, they stood one another off though close. Imp Plus tried to know what they were points of. He said to himself they were in his mind. But when he once more confined the source of his sight to the ridge of optic membrane on a spine of shearow that he once more stationed beside the window, and the fields were even more thin and sheetlike than before with multi-sight but seen now to intersect each other, he knew he had been seeing these fields since long before the great thought’s suspended ultramicrons of milky smoke, and had thought these fields shadows of the light.

And shadows, now he thought about it, from those particles of his own sun that had not braided themselves with the great Sun.

And so they might yet be.

But seeing from out the wide length of his halted shearow’s membrane beam, he saw many of these fields coming from one surface source, high above which hung an expelled electrode-sliver adrift; and these fields of ultrapoints streamed forth thence in the form of a cone and it was volute because spiralled into an endlessly uncompleted funnel — till they broke off and flattened followed by others. But now Imp Plus saw the once-hidden wire that ran from the pump’s and plant tubes’ housing on the brain — or what had been the brain — across the cortex to this site-source of the funnel fields. And at this site on what had been the cortex, that sliver in the air above had once been stuck.

These fields of charge, then, came from the open wire that ran from the nutrient tubes’ brainward housing on the brain rim. And the wire’s charge came from the thickly insulated cables running to this underhouse across brief space from the box on the capsule bulkhead opposite the window. And now he knew the box. He had heard echoing in a giant shell of a place where the Good Voice had shown just where the IMP skin’s facets of narrow-panelled Sun-receptor cells fed into the capsule to this inside box. Bus, the voice had called it, having already said, “Go ahead, feel free to look around, it’s all yours.” And the giant room — the facility, the voice called it — echoing round the beached IMP capsule, had clamped shut the meshing waves of valve shell on Imp Plus, but on the Good Voice too maybe, so that Imp Plus wished to be alone with his desire.

Which led not where but how: or so he’d thought, not knowing he would think his own growth and be apart from Ground in chances more curious than he himself would foresee. For wait: that choking gel of the great thought that he could think his own growth had stopped not just the dual plant-tube streams but the disc-shaped pump inside the underhousing, and the pump had not begun again till after the welcome charge had run through the thickening gel and blown the ultramicrons or what else they were out to hang dissolving and dispersed in nets of springy work.

But wait: what had stopped the pump had stopped what ran the pump, and what ran the pump would be watts from solar cells in the great panels mounted outside with the albedo receptor and infrared camera.

He thought he wanted not to think about it. It brought back Ground that said, MAXIMUM POWER IN ACCUMULATOR. GLUCOSE UP. It brought back the Good Voice that had said — not “Vanity,” which had come later from the woman combed and beached, but—“You don’t want to go on forever.” It brought back Ground saying WHAT IS GOING ON UP THERE? and thinking Imp Plus had gone on too long. (Though how long? or how much too long?)

He was one thing.

For better or worse.

The Sunbraids pivoted along the outer stream-lines and routes of the wendings and across the transverse lip-swells of the faldoreams, their pores aglint with late mineral crusts of the great gland’s force itself seen everywhere both in this late crust and in the shapes of glow. And his own sun sprayed slow in banks of particles. He liked them slow. They had caused him pain. They must have.

And he loved the functions of sight and taste and thought and smell and chances desired and held in memory. Loved the morphogen-eruptions paired now at either end of many runglike axes — not along the wending-motions but along faldoreams which seemed thus to trim the draping fringes of their golden hides, and change their sluggishness into dark shearows one of which, with two morphogens bulbing up again and again in a flesh that turned opaque, reached down again to embrace now two connected plant-bed houses. And Imp Plus knew he could not even want to stop what he also knew might lead him to why he had stood away, turned away, from the great thought that he could think his own growth.

For the shade over the algae and anabaena beds chilled him to the bone, contracted the wendings, clouded the crusts of force that glinted from the pores of the faldoreams. But most — the spindle-radii of his own radiance raced through him toward the plantward tube as if against a thing so like them he’d not seen different motions. And the morphogen beats now snapped that growing shearow out of its embrace to test by contrast what the shade-chill had done; for Imp Plus saw that the plant-tube currents ran full tilt again, likewise the pump in the housing at what had been the brainward end.

So the pump slowed when the plant-works lost their Sun. But the particles of radiance not already bound with the great Sun into braids raced through Imp Plus to get to the plantward tube. But if the pump — pumping what? — got its power through the volt circuit from the solar cells, the only thing that could make that pump slow (or stop, as it had stopped when Imp Plus had choked) was a change in that power.

The loss of power had come with the loss of Sun when Imp Plus had shaded the plant beds. Only one thing connected the two losses: the race of unbraided radiance through all parts of him including the parts where lay sections of the bus cable from the solar arrays mounted outside.

The radiance was rays, was brightness, was his own sun. But in the radiation of its promise he did not know what it could be, this sun of his. A race of radiance, but an impeded race to the plantward tube.

From his angle at the window seeing inward he thought he saw transmission waves had stopped coming in to all the hanging slivers but one. Yet other slivers might remain. Shallow, deep. If deep, maybe now mobile through all streams and intersections of his work. Which he found hard to sense without the multi-sight he was trying not to use.

There seemed more, but it seemed slower. Racing for the underhousing to get into the plantward tube, the spindle-radiations of his own sun seemed impeded by a thing — a potion: until Imp Plus saw this was the old radiant force from the once-flaming gland which for the moment he did not find.

He found his microsight burned into action and found the gland’s flood all over again now pulsed of particles and meshed so fine that as he understood why his spindle-radii had such wading impedance to breathe their way through, and as he saw the flood’s charged and deviant lattices through which the radiant spindle-radii fought to pass, he barely understood in the opening of all the pain he had ever known which now burned whole in breath after breath that pulsed away his very name — barely understood — that the particles of the gland’s flood, though infinitesimal next to the spindle-radii, were in every other way and every place identical and the same.

This turn — this motion or mind — came in him not from a site-source like that of the funnel fields; it came all over him at once; so he felt equal to himself at the same time that he had nowhere else to turn.

And at this moment he was trapped in a multi-sight that felt the reverse of trapped because it was not stop but passage, though sieved through lattices and lattices inside and out. And he could not stand off the one lattice fixed like potion crystal that came at him.

Until he saw it was an Earthly fence.

Inside was one thing, outside another.

And the fence with a red high-voltage sign told him that here, in the capsule and his being, the silver insulation about the solar-power cable had not been strong enough against the lattices of his own field, his radii seeking use.

He was sieved back and forth through the fence but the pain went into his knowing he was the fence.

If potioned by the lattice, he became the lattice. Dissolved, reconstituted.

It was hard and he needed help, but he had had it.

He was hardening but not choking.

What had saved him from choking was that he must think his own growth. But in the last long while he had not grown. He had moved, reached, contracted, and held up. But he had not increased.

Yet chances to go further led to chances. A chill from the plant beds had told him he was a part of them. A child coughed in winter smoke. Strands loosened and tightened in the corner of eyes, turned red when warm and then resiliently resumed their x-ray breath. The blind news vendor said he could have been a vegetable. The Acrid Voice said something that was not bad. Imp Plus saw he himself was the Micronesian giant with algae inside — though why not brown from the Sun? — but while the big clam could open its shell with its adductor muscle he could not enlarge his capsule.

He was tired but warm. The words reminded him: but of almost nothing: then the spines of the shearows drew a ripple of morphogens down their length like a hand under a cover and Imp Plus saw that though lacking lips he had laughed.

There were more spindle-radii but not more of himself. The spindle-radii found themselves braiding equally with the streaming quanta radiating from the Sun’s early-evening hand.

He must take hold, vegetable, animal, or himself. In daylight he knew the algae, anabaena, and other plants worked with what came to them to work with, and something came back up the upward tube. At night the dark upon the plants should have chilled him but had not. And while the pump had slowed or stopped when the plants were dark, and when the pump had stopped he had choked, while when he choked the pump stopped — he did not choke at night. At night, glucose and other life signs were high. But the cable from the solar-power bus ran to the pump house — pump house? — the morphogens rippled down the slow faldoreams and then the wendings waved the living knobs of the morphogens — he was laughing — so, chill or not, the pump pumped at night by Sun power stored from the day. But Ground had said that at night electricity remained at maximum.

He must think to grow, but what now happened he must watch.

A sleeve of orbiting Sunbraids shrank around the silver-sheathed cable and became hard. The pump paused. The sleeve flew slowly off. The pump went on.

He had the power. So he could kill himself. Perhaps with help.

The wendings turned slower and a pale grid of vacancy made a move counter to the wendings. Some new returning center was gearing into him.

He felt himself everywhere latticed. To counter this he moved. But only sleeved the cable and saw the funnel fields of charge stop spraying from the open end of the wire that came from the pump housing into which the solar cable went.

And then the pump did not stop.

For though he did not know how, he now knew the power could come from him, which was why the solar batteries did not lose juice at night.

He found he had known already.

The sleeve let go, and the solar circuit took over, but the radiant particles had done that sleeving to show him what he half knew. He knew half.

But must know more. Must know what down in the plant beds reflected his limb when it lay touching the plant housing.

He had known ultramicron, and thought he had not known it from the Dim Echo or the Acrid Voice. The fiery fence was himself as he had been, and the project engineers had handled him with kid gloves for he was to be hooked up to their system and then spent. But he would use them too.

He had looked into an ingrown body of mouth upon grooves and arches of a tongue laid with velvet nipples of light-receptor cells: he saw he had been the point of the dune watcher’s long, unknowing gaze, for Imp Plus had looked into her mouth—her not him, but how to mouth the difference, for was there a difference between a her mouth and a him mouth? — and he had known he did not fear loss on an operating table the next week: had known that as his microsight came to him by division upon division, the unknown desire that had come to him on the beach in place of fear divided its long vacancy to yield the pain of caving, the knowledge that contained the pain, and a lasting division of body-brain by will, to yield what he was and would be.

But which will?

He must know more.

Electrical power sprayed in his substance again. It sprayed from the open line below the hanging sliver. He saw that his new being — for all its impurity and potion — was a lattice that could take these sprays of the great Sun with whom he was in league and conduct them hither and yon.

But he did not know why, then, a slow, slow shearow reached out and, in its hardening state unable to divide its aim into fingers, guided the sliver electrode down toward the open wire where it lay partway down what once would have been a left frontal slope of folds, had there now or then been anyone here to face away from the bulb-bun cerebellum and thus have a left and front. And Imp Plus knew that where the sliver was to be reimplanted was not only the site-source of the funnel fields in what had been the cortex of the brain; it was also the site of the Concentration Loop.

10

Which meant Imp Plus would be in touch with Ground again.

If Ground was still talking.

And if, more to the point, it was to the Concentration Loop that the live wire from the pump house extended the cable’s solar juice.

But aiming the sliver down at this site the shearow divided the descent. Divided it not so much by stages of adapting or distance or the nights of time he had lost among more and more glial cells, but divided it by simultaneous attentions all around.

So the descent took time. Like steps in orbital tests long ago. Tests? Specimen growth arrested periodically by chemicals so the growth could be studied.

Another shearow not so adept as the one engaged in reimplanting the electrode got caught up in a wending-motion and found its image now darker in the chlorella beds. Two morphogens slipped with the look of a kiss-suck from a slow-rolling faldoream whose ciliary fringes radiated messages around Imp Plus. And when the morphogens like muscles or spasms seeking muscles joined the shearow, they burrowed in to bulge out just when Imp Plus found the shearow’s pressure on the sliver crystallized into a grip: whose prongs were the morphogens prodding out of the plasm they’d just joined.

Which, like the slowness of the wendings over the reflections from the chlorella beds, made it all seem heavier. He was being kept, he thought, from seeing it all. Kept too by the very equalness of feeling whole; of thinking all over; not centered. He had stood away from the whole view of his new being. But now he would not. Yet to grip what he had, he must go on being more; and to hold what he had unfolded and had, he must know what it was he knew. A wave passed through him. Albedo. Salmonella. Ultramicron. Opti-chlorella. The kiss of breath. His attentions found no one source-site of the words, but his shearow with its bone-tight hold of morphogens pressed the sliver closer to where it had once been implanted in a fold that had dilated. He had had a head for figures, had known ultramicron, had felt the bright cells of his tongue nibbled by the mouth of a being who said, “Vanity”; and he had eaten olives with the Acrid Voice that transmitted the pits out of its mouth by making them vanish into the thumb end of a fist. Through days and nights of a synchronous orbit that kept to Earth as a circular hand keeps to a clockface dial fixed to it, Imp Plus had feared Earth; for he might lose breath as he had lost weight. Weightless he had grown more and more.

More weightless? More words came everywhere. Locus. Cada. Templadas. Yet came from the local faldoream dividing and dividing an endless space from the descending electrode to where the shearow aimed it.

Weightless, he had gained. As had the salmonella bacteria years ago that multiplied faster weightless.

But he had crowded the capsule all by himself and though the Acrid Voice had made more space by talking the Good Voice out of the added weight of an on-board video monitor, Imp Plus knew where he would gain weight: Earth would give him weight.

For if Earth had made him less, still if Earth had not subtracted him there would have been zero growth.

Subtracted him from himself. Divided him by himself. But chosen him because he chose himself.

The project had gone to him because he had gone to it. Known to known. To be its ultraradius describing unknown by knowns. Describing ellipses yielding Sun milk and spiral braids and seabirds reflecting shadows that flashed crimson darts in the warm day but flashed infrequently in the cold night which now came on again like pulses of division impeding the sliver’s descent.

Until the shearow must question this division: and with a glimpse of a fresh fan or delta spraying charge through him from the open wire (and not looking different from the charge set off by the chemical juice spurted between neurons), and like a life for whose support he told himself he didn’t need a capsule that could change size — the shearow then proceeded with the help of the now hard-clamped morphogens to pinch the sliver back into place in the charged surface.

For at that instant Imp Plus had seen elsewhere what the wending shearow’s reflection was reflection in. It was his find. His discovery.

Ground was saying words. Words heard before. A voice itself reached up into memory — overheard? transmitted? part each — AFFIRMATIVE IMP PLUS WHAT WOULD BE ADVANTAGE OF CAPSULE THAT COULD CHANGE SIZE, AND HELLO AGAIN IMP PLUS HAVE YOU BEEN THERE LONG TIME NO HEAR. THOUGHT YOU DESERTED US.

But what was his discovery?

Out of the shearow the morphogens stuck thumbs unopposable, stiff, and together, and these also cramped the shearow. Imp Plus felt a symmetroid stiffening in the shearow with the morphogen but also in that other shearow that was again above the plant beds, and in other darkening shapes. He reported oxygen and glucose gauge readings stable and no undue accumulations of CO_2. Imp Plus thought he answered Ground without giving Ground his discovery.

The discovery was water.

He recalled saying water, seeing water drop so tensely bonded that though it flattened into discs it hit the Earth like bombs. But the discovery was more than what the reflection had been reflected in; it was a discovery of time: time elapsed, time possible. Time ahead in the solar wind from which there was no lee.

The wending shearow had found a length of its membrane glittering not in the plastic cover over the algae but in water.

Vanity, came a dissolved voice up out of salt water from an Earthly sea.

Not this water. This water was Imp Plus’s discovery. Water.

Water so deep he became mindful for the first time of how little there was of him now when it was too late to answer that open-mouthed voice, Vain animal.

Water deep too considering all the solid hours spent here in a season of space that Imp Plus recalled like an eclipse of Earth.

Requests how long ago for enzyme action in chlorella.

Requests which looked now like tests merely of alertness in the odd fish cast toward chance hunger. A time of shadows more than birds. Bodies more than body. Shifts so new there were not words to show them. So all he did was reply to the great Sun each day and reply in the nighttime work of the plant beds and the looks and nets of communal and independent lumens changing through darks that were changed in turn by the lumens.

But time possible. For Project TL had launched him with water enough only to give the plants a fighting chance to be explored by rays. Sun rays free of Earth’s choking film yet finely latticed by new giant molecules built specially for this IMP’s mineral window.

Rays also greater, heavy, and unknown.

But water. How much could there be after how much time?

The shearow restored the sliver and before it found its bed again the sliver was already speaking.

Asking and again asking Imp Plus to check oxygen. As if Ground had not its own telemetry. And asking Imp Plus as it had not for years almost, or days and days, for frequency and orbit.

But before Imp Plus could say SYNCHRONOUS or hear Ground say NEGATIVE IMP PLUS, SAY AGAIN, and before Imp Plus could recall the camouflage cover of an orbit quite other than synchronous, and before he could see at once that Ground suspected an alien monitor, Imp Plus saw that moments ago he had transmitted the routine glucose and oxygen readings even before the shearow and its bone-firm clamp had had the sliver implanted. The sliver had been poised above its bed away from the streaming fan of loose power that went out into a substance of himself which he had no name for as yet but which, as one who recalled ultramicrons and a fence with a red sign telling him he would die, he had come to think was lattice acting like the crystal in the solar cells mounted outside. The word was lattice, he had gotten it all over again and now so that it conducted him Earthward.

He wanted to be away from the fence. Yet it could do nothing to him, for he was already it.

He must see the water. He must get into it. He must be in the plants. See what the Sun had done there. He persisted in this. This thought. Which was that the Sun had saved him as he had planned.

His parts still gave the crimson signal but not frequently. But they did not increase in size. And they had composed into a state that did not look like movement; yet this might be because, no more than he could re-form the particles of that hypothalamus the Dim Echo had named, could Imp Plus want to withdraw from multi-sight; and in the simultaneity of multi-sight there seemed an element of motion that seemed in turn to hold the object of its focus still. But there was the motion in his parts. He knew that the hypothalamus now lost through his substance had been a set of controls: and was this set then in a course of dissolution, or was it finely spread? The motion in his parts was spiral whether he stared at the plant beds or not. And slower, as if his compound eye closed in on what it only partly knew it wanted. It was what his laboring microsight examined and it was itself that microsight. He recalled tired. It was not wanting to go on, and he had been this during some time before launch.

It was when he had thought himself that fence.

Or the fence he was to be.

For he had thought this too. Though then it was — he was — a lattice the Project personnel moved through. He had thought this because of the place between the larger and the smaller green rooms, the place where he lay down and let go his controls. To sleep with a voice not Acrid, not Good.

A voice saying what to do: during launch, orbital insertion, orbit. Impressing him with a grid of acts to echo not himself but the Project. But more a lattice with glittering nodes for each angle of intersection: a lattice that data went back and forth through.

So he let this happen and he turned to a thing parallel: the fence with the red high-voltage sign.

In this turn he did not see why he dwelt upon that fence for it told him he was dying. He did not know dying. But when the voice let him get up again, he felt a split. And now to Ground that saw no advantage in an enlargeable capsule he would not explain that even if after programming he was not exactly in clover, the secret split embraced him: it was the fence terrible in its promise: its promise to use him.

Two promises. One if he served as the fence. One if he did not. What could Ground know of such a fence? To Earth Imp Plus might as well be one of those old experiments with salmonella.

He stared into the plant waters. What came back was a desire for a part: desire compounding nothing but what had become of him — a segment of plasm turned as by an elbow bone; a section of plasm shadowed out of color but clear-skinned of scales he saw were cells grown to the surface; a strip of glow, a faldoream membrane sending mild light after the falling face of the Sun from which it had learned. Amid this composite a thirst for circles said that centers had returned. And then in with the fires running down the plantward tube from the housing, he saw potato shapes glisten and drop from the cups of algae no longer green in the blue-brown evenings which had fused outward with days in a field. And the field was him, grown to no scale but the alpha of the great Sun eclipsing the drag of all the magma underneath Earth’s Ground.

But if the scale was imponderable and tiring, the shape looked to be the same potato-shaped power plant he’d found in the cells of what had been his brain. The power plants called mitochondria staring through the saffron cytoplasm and platinum-sparked sheaths of glia and breathing each a path of particles through locks of light. And here now in the plants what looked to be the same potato shape. For had he and the Sun, then, brought the power plants of his own cells together with the power plants of the algae? Each potato shape with two membranes, the inner inwardly folded.

But the folds here varied from those in the brain’s mitochondria. These folds lay deep within the shadows of each alga, each fold like the gill of that Micronesian clam, slow folds some thickened into sac-discs stacked so that Imp Plus, staring through membranes and interior baths of sluggish-flowing tissue-cover, found not just the same charged bodies he’d seen rolling down one tube bound in shell orbits bound one smaller between two larger. He found then, deep within the lamina of the stacks, the bodies he then knew he had been looking to find. For they were the idea of green that he had thought to himself so long ago that he had almost the power to forget the name of these bodies which he saw now were really blue-black as if because the Sun had gone away. But the darkness down here was another light, not just the hand and face of the Sun at work in the evening communities of himself. For this darkness here deep within the potato-shaped chloroplasts, was a lumen of force as needed as all their daytime work. For through the semi-fluid which bathed the folds and their stacked discs, Imp Plus saw drop after drop globe out into the being of an independent pulse of flow and saw it was the same sugar he lived on and pumped through his system, and saw again amid one field of radiating particles that his desire had been to see this sweetness and more. And the more he was and saw was more than he had desired. For the potato shape lay also near shoes of yellow hide, and was also a drop that rose over a ridge and leaned along a hair and arced thousands of miles into a fire whose face — his own — gave light to another face wet with failure.

The potato shape of the algae’s chloroplast power plant was not the first potato shape glistening on a leaf and dropping into water. This potato shape that dropped was water. And this was what made the target drops into systemed rings mapping (as if to get back to) an inside with other potato shapes within the leaf’s chloroplast he had prepared to remember or had been prepared by a voice he’d heard to remember — the rings of each blue-black molecule that held the idea of green: rings concentered, though, as that molecule at the heart of the chloroplast was apparently not. For the molecule had a tail.

A gradient inclination. A want containing enwrapped within itself radii to come.

It was beautiful as the face that wept halfway between the automobile and the shoes of yellow hide beside the fire. But he’d said You are beautiful to the other face too — that had opened the sweet lids of its mouth to him and said, “Vanity,” and laughed.

Ground asked again for orbit and speed. Imp Plus saw that with the Sun and with the plants and with desires that divided him even from the memories designed to keep those desires at work, he had grown water. He had grown water to support the substance he had also grown.

But his sight held him, and so did the bone-knob morphogens fixed round the Concentration electrode. This electrode was fixed in the gray-amber anti-fold at the solar wire.

So he must see through whatever his sight joined and collabored.

Be drawn between the three sizes of body with all their infinitesimal orbiting point-bodies in the tail of the blue-black idea of green and what he found in the waters and in the airs above, through which the periodic drops rammed the water surface to fix craters there and centers becoming circumferences. And what he saw was what he had seen but not made clear to himself: namely, that, with Ground treating him now like some alien monitor, he wanted only to live on. But not name. Yet the fence on Earth would not go away. For he was the fence. And so he knew that two of the bodies in the blue-black tail rebonded in the plant beds to be water; and that the third body in the blue-black tail though changed from its look in the plantward tube had arms like valences of memory which told him it was the smaller middle shell of the unit flowing in such numbers plantward.

Which told him in turn that the large shell with its arms, and its electrons — they were electrons — was the same body that helped form the water.

But not the same as the now-amber Sunbraids flowing also plantward which after bursting into the plant house divided above and below the waters. And below blasted some of the bonds apart — apart, up, and out, lowering the surface of the water. But then (with another body not from the tail of the blue-black inner molecule but from its main ring-system) the Sunbraids increased both parts of the water bond immeasurably in volume and rebound them so as to make of the water a net increase.

And he knew through the recollected pain of the nets of charged fence that those Sunbraids that did so much had once come from Earth and had been of Earth even if not in their bonds of braid now.

But not giving Ground what it wanted, Imp Plus found his way back by way of the musing faldoream to the prior transmission. Step by step. Like steps in tests: deep unmanned tests to the asteroids, that was it. For what? A drogue of concentration jammed, thickened, and slowed him toward what he foresaw as solid with one and only one number of crests or crusted angles. Thus, he felt the risk of sleep in the faldoream’s musing words “Nuclear fishing.” So he told Ground Ground had been right that there would be no advantage in a capsule that could enlarge, for after all it was not as if this was one of the old Biosatellite experiments with salmonella that multiplied.

But when Ground replied that Imp Plus had not given the requested information, Imp Plus felt a further frequency in Ground’s transmission.

Like a pause for thought.

Imp Plus did not know pause. He could wonder what his limits were.

But then the transmission did go on and in all his being Imp Plus found symmetroid increase that was not the old growth.

This increase was result but cause of the words that came from Ground. They came in the known pulses. But they bore an unknown bond. But a bond he understood he must take the charge of, for then he remembered the bond and it was in his memory of the future, and the words carried a voice he knew: IMP PLUS REMEMBER TWO KINDS OF SALMONELLA NOT ONE. EVEN THE ONE THAT MULTIPLIED ALMOST THREE TIMES FASTER THAN THE OTHER DID NOT GO ON FOREVER IMP PLUS.

Ground stopped and went on, but there was a disturbance around the solar feed wire. Or rather there had been a disturbance and now was none: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS REPEAT PLEASE GIVE ORBITAL SPEED.

This second transmission seemed designed to do away with the first.

But the bond came back. And with a force it hadn’t had chance to have on Earth for it had been unknown by Imp Plus. But clear now: clear as aqueous humor in an Earthly eye that led in memory through sugar systems to microsight.

The bond had been drawn on a green blackboard by bone-white chalk. Drawn frequently. In numbers and words. And in an ellipse that talked. With two foci, one not there but one the Earth.

Drawn by a hand from which Imp Plus in the smoke of death had withdrawn dividing known illness by known desire until, instead of multiplying, the particles of illness seemed to dissolve in a resolution to proceed.

The bond was with the Acrid Voice.

The Acrid Voice had given him attention. Had briefed. Had smoked because it could not stop. Had talked smoke which drove Imp Plus out of his mind into a towering headache, then out of a green room into the Sun to a telephone. But the Acrid Voice had been talking from known point to known point without promises. Had stopped short of goodness. Not like the repeating Good Voice advancing into emptiness.

“You don’t want to go on forever,” the Acrid Voice knew how to say, and “What would be the advantage of a capsule that could change size?”

Maybe the Acrid Voice had known what Imp Plus had in his head. The Acrid Voice anchored itself to fact.

The bond had been there in fact. Imp Plus had known it.

But what bond now?

None but the interruption of the Acrid Voice by Ground to put Imp Plus again to the test whether it was he there or an alien monitor. No, the bonds were not there but here. With the Sun. With the power of braid. Bonds among himself.

But bonds he desired only to be — was that it?

Bonds he need only be. Albedo, said the faldoream among the turns of Imp Plus’s being; said softly or hoarsely through ciliary fringes slowly conversing into structures of saffron salts—Albedo, albedo.

And from one direction came the old choking, and Imp Plus said to himself that maybe nothing he thought to find here was a thing but was only recalled from the windy drogues of Earth: but this thought was not brisk enough to solve the choking coagulation—coagulation was the word to use. But it was Ground’s word. He was picking up some of Ground’s words which asked to be used. But for what?

But then in the choking and the converse chasm of not caring, the coagulation that like further processes had been slowing, stiffening, thickening, fixing him from function into a thing of crusted angles, gathered and carried the stalled presence of the Sunbraids into light that now opened the chloroplasts deep within the plants. Which Imp Plus saw so well he saw electrons and holes. In a rush. A promised migration that seemed to let him outside the IMP to see how the Sun hit the photovoltaic cells in the solar panels and drove electrons out of those cells into a circuit of power.

Which the Acrid Voice had not had to tell him. For Imp Plus had been somebody. That is, who had known ultramicrons.

Two faldoreams at right angles tried to shake with humor. The longitudinal drapings crystallized away from saffron toward a discolor like that of the long-dispersed optic chiasma.

But the night warmth came not from such fun. The warmth came upon this now almost wholly interior spiral so constant now that it did not come back because it did not go away.

It had to go somewhere: or go nowhere except the faldoream’s “Nuclear fishing.” He did not get away from fish. The osprey off the beach plummeted and was pulled under briefly by its prey. Imp Plus’s sight of the wendings speeded up or the wendings slowed down: so they were fixed past motion — and past color — functions thus then recalled into a new solid. Certain wendings — inside themselves at least — moved like circumferences one way; certain inner wendings diametrically narrower moved the other way. A string of morphogens, more than he’d known he had, inclined across two or three faldoreams (exactly two or three) grown close together, and the train of morphogen-knobs having joined inner to outer wendings winked red so slow the train spread into milder and milder light until Imp Plus wondering why it spread no more saw that it spread no more.

He thought that if, as before during the choke of gear-dust, thought coagulated without more thought, still then there could come the need for a coagulation other than failure. And what Earth thought Imp Plus knew was misguided. So was Earth to think itself the center for Imp Plus’s radius.

The Acrid Voice must have known what was in Imp Plus’s head. Imp Plus had meant to live. A capsule — even a polyhedron IMP with an unprecedented window — might be built to enlarge; but it must stop somewhere. Imp Plus had grown to cram the capsule, then had done other things. Contracted, regrouped, been turned into other motions. Electrical motion, too, though if to control the capsule’s orbit he did not know. Meanwhile the great Sun in its forms fished where it would. And Imp Plus braided with it his sun he had brought to multiply from Earth. But if these suns braided in part from Imp Plus’s desire remembered from those last weeks of Earthly determination, and if those braids streaming down the plantward tube constantly ruptured the water bond of a given volume of water in order then to multiply and multiply the elements of the bond and then rebond them to make a net increase of water, he knew only that it could happen: not that it would.

But did he want it to always happen? What would he do if it did? Drips of sweet flow edged up the upward tube. He did not need but did not find any sweet-eye now to float him through to the microsight he unquestionably had.

What was a life-support system?

And then he saw what a question was. And did so by seeing he hadn’t known before. And by finding these specimen questions.

A question was what an answer was to.

A shudder rippled the diametric thing or axle the morphogen-knobs became, and he thought that the triple units sharing the downward tube with the Sunbraids were carbon dioxide. Imp Plus saw that oxygen (likewise not alone) kept coming back up the tube from the plants even now at night during the dark cycle. He saw mingling with suns and other powers in the plant housing bodies, he’d also seen in the main ring-system of the blue-black bodies of green idea deep inside the algae’s latticed chloroplasts.

But to see these half-knowns was not to find a way through to himself. He held and was held: he was the things he saw: the laminas were equally one: the way was through a lattice letting him see that as the chloroplasts could be electrical semi-conductors like solar cells mounted outside beside the solar telescopes and albedo receptors, so had his own substance a semi-conductor’s lattices of migrant electrons and migrant holes; and, weightless, it all might grow purer as other semi-conductors had through a generation of orbital work.

A semi-conductor. This was what Imp Plus was.

But the way he found was not the sight; the way was through it.

To a fence so Earthly far away that this fence would not be seen through.

Until then he heard the Acrid Voice see through it.

And Imp Plus had the meaning of the two salmonellas then. In weightless space, the one multiplied three times as fast as the other; for the three-times one, unlike the other, had been irradiated: was that radiant?

Which took him back: took him and rocked him back: jabbed him with such retro burn that his orbit deteriorated: took him back, but back to what was not radiant but subjected to radiation.

But the faldoreamic murmurings had begun to string a net of harmony. Music to his membranes. So he tried hard to see the sense of what now shot at him grid after grid volted from the Earthly fence but no longer with the pulsing flash of red: and these grids told him weightlessness speeds changes induced by radiation yet may also slow some processes and so give irradiated cells a chance to cure their injuries or at least make vital the proliferations these cells would not escape.

But through the music of the faldoreams Imp Plus found the refrain of albedo, albedo like a gentle retro drag, not heard, only recalled. And in what he took to be the drift of himself, he knew that albedo was no more than Sun radiation come back from Earth, and that the potion dispersed all through him dawn after dawn from the now-dispersed flaming gland and from the rest of him, had also been poison.

And so it happened that Imp Plus, sloping into another clarity of pulsion, could stand where he had stood one dawn on Earth. Particles not seen punched jots of him from one place to the next. Particles cut through him. Cutting through to burn what would be cut away later. And burn what would not.

Burn his knowing the burning.

Burn through a winter in which what was happening to him was to most others unknown. Unknown to a wintry windy red-eyed news vendor, who said he could have been a vegetable. And to a child who licked snow off a hand and said Your skin is red. (Did the child mind?) And to a dark amiga who sang amiga. Whom he had tried to be known by before and failed, and who was beautiful. And to another far away but on the same point who was beautiful too and who jolted him by using the words Travel light so that he had now to try not to suspect her while he went on trying not to tell her his truth about Project Operation Travel Light and the blood that came into his face was camouflaged by that irritation the child had seen months before reddening week by week setting him apart.

Once when he’d had a leg to stand on, he had stood under a roof at the end of many nights, he had stood upon a crust of Earth; and nothing seemed to happen for a moment.

Magma did not uncrust itself. Voices did not strike at once.

But in that moment which, once behind him, was the prospect of agony, a reticle of radii breathed into him. Once in, let go. Rods of gamma radii logging his blood, invaginating the veins, thinning the skin, replacing him with a buzzing meant to choke with nets of probability an absence still possible.

At last now he stood again on that potioned point upon Earth’s circle. Yet now his radius self made Earth itself no more than one point along his own unknown circumference.

Which like some future map took him where he had not known he’d planned to be.

So all he knew was that what life he was possessed of inclined him to give Ground answers. In return for answers that in turn might make him know the more that he had come to be.

Imp Plus recalled the Contingency Camouflage plan designed to deceive an alien monitor. Imp Plus concentered his crystal on the pulses of a frequency agreed on Earth. Imp Plus transmitted to Ground the false frequency. And as, at last, he let the milky skin along the billowing shearow at the window see out the window, he transmitted to Ground what Ground’s plan called for, the false orbital speed.

11

Jolts — what — jolts — what — jolts cracked his skull out of his brain. Jolts drained the bone out of his shoe. Jolts tipped him elsewhere. He jumped or fell, he spun, he was in a spin of gyro-lobs slow fast.

There was an awful lack of pain. Where? He was touched by slivers jarred within their weightless sky, and their pulsings recalled commands from when he had been little more than the Dim Echo. Jolts ripped his sight through the window. He’d lost his tubes, was that it, this it? The shearow at the window was so dislodged it recalled leaps it no longer inclined to take and it was jolted back against the glass in time to see through it far away a dark dot in a cloudy break. But the far dot was a line, tiny, slow, jagged. It tumbled sideways, but how did something far away tumble? He did not see it for a second.

But no, he’d seen more than it; for he’d seen it far away on an arc-edge of a greater thing also far away: a cloudy thing, cloudy blue.

The jolts came over again. He shook on his pins and he did not stop spinning. The jolts would not stop. He had forgotten he had no skull. For his skull was trying to get out from inside his brain, and he had no brain now.

The cloudy blue thing fell into the window and then out. The dark dot he’d picked out became a jagged line again. So small he thought he might be only remembering and not seeing.

The dot-line far away out there through the window was an opening.

Into another jolt.

The jolt spun out the window. And he thought his skull in trying to get out from inside his brain broke a needle of bone through the dot that was a jagged line again now in the spinning window. But was as far away as a voice that had said the brain feels no pain.

He had no skull. He had no brain. He had left it in orbit. He was still in orbit, but around himself. But no parking orbit. Orbit jarring into orbit.

Braking. That was what the jolts were.

Ground was braking him. But into greater speed. Into lower and lower orbit. Ground was bringing him in.

The dot-line came by again. A mark on the greater cloudy blue thing. He had to blink, but the need trickled in toes he could not reach to scratch. Across the window of mist that he tried to blink against slid a molecular shift the equal and opposite reaction to which was the jagged dot’s transit out of sight again and with it the cloudy break through which it had been seen in the cloudy blue thing.

He was in launch all over again, was that it? Or on a spring end of someone’s thought launching him back in reverse launch. Sorry, too cramped to turn around, got to back up, burn one, burn two, don’t ask, don’t look behind you at what’s about to skewer you, just get into the right attitude.

The Good Voice had said, “You’ll get some rest up there.”

The back-firings unhinged him; they did not hurt. If this was reverse launch he was in, it was not the idea he’d had of orbit decaying. The tumbling turned and when he found that the turning tumbled he saw clearly like speech to himself that the decay was hastened and multiplied by Ground.

And reverse launch without the housing. The housing over Imp Plus that had eased the suck of speed but had not kept his face from being dragged away.

The housing hit him like a thought, took him tangent as the buzzing slivers adrift had bumped off him aiming commands he could receive if he wanted to reimplant the slivers as he’d done the sliver for the Concentration Loop. Think of all he could do. The jolts jammed him back, and took him over himself over and over — but did they cause the rolling tumble of spin? The jolts had been set off by his own words giving the Contingency Camouflage formula. And in turn by chance the jolts had caused the housing to hit him and the slivers which he and no one else had sprung adrift in the first place. He had given the Camouflage formula but not with the attitude Ground thought.

He could see Ground’s viewpoint, but others also. He saw one shearow aligned now with the long weight of a faldoream. Ground’s viewpoint was that it did not want a take-over. Of IMP or of IMP’s work or the data. Hence the dual plan for Contingency Camouflage. But here now it was not dual: he did not jolt or tumble Ground (did he?) — Ground jolted him.

Dual was control. Control was being taken from him. Did he recall dual control because he was a machine? The crimson flash was not frequent now and it flashed beneath crystal laminations that made it retreat like inhaling. But if control was dual, wait. He thought of what was out the window, thought of it fixed: then thought of his own chain of morphogen-knobs, a diameter without question but centerless and bounded not by circumference or perimeter, but by a dimensional breath that was more than spiral wending and less and less and less like respiration.

But then he thought this because dual (he saw) only went with “control.” Dual was two.

And together.

Two ends, for one thing.

He looked along two like ends of what he took for a shearow inclined sideways into a faldoream. But they twisted and twined here and camouflaged their differences: for this faldoream and this shearow were independently of him merging the one’s draping weight and the other’s bounding reach into a line, into alignment, a second diameter across Imp Plus’s growing fixity of substance — and across also the spine of morphogen-knobs: and he thought he could not tell faldoream from shearow now any more than either end of each pair of ends of length which across the hardening skin were fibers as pale as the lines the Acrid Voice had drawn on a slate wall, fibers tensed by sheaths of arrayed salts yet tensile in their give and bend with the jolts which now turned Imp Plus back: turned him to the shadows Ground had once read in Imp Plus’s thought untransmitted: for somewhere he knew that Ground had followed its own query WHAT SHADOWS, IMP PLUS? with the command CHECK DUAL ATTITUDE STABILIZER.

So control of attitude was dual.

If so, Imp Plus had earned it, it had not been given.

Given words were at all points of himself but so fixed in statement that he thought of the Dim Echo: and of words given not in the small or the large green room but between the two, in sleep, a statement learned: “Spin-stabilizer rocket orients spin axis at right angles to plane of Sun’s apparent path.”

So maybe Imp Plus could do a thing or two to halt or unspin the jump and tumble of this reefless shipwreck — if he could just remember where his own on-board attitude stabilizer worked.

His own: for it was one experimental operation that like the Concentration Loop or exchanging CO_2 for oxygen and glucose used Imp Plus himself. Manual backing up automatic. Back-up. Manual. He thought he laughed with a ripple of cartilage along the morphogen-axle. Manual O Manual. OM_2.

Manual tried to grip: he heard knuckles snap far away across a four-dimensional grid of laughter. Laughter not only his, but when he thought whose else, he saw ahead sand and heat and more sand that refracted parts of what he once had been.

And then two things happened. First — if it was first — this utter throw of spin and kick and jam and tumble of gyrate torque came round to what proved this skid through broken orbits to have been not whole: for what he now was in was an equilibrium: unique equilibrium refracted through his more and more rigorous form — equilibrium which gave to that forgotten, stiffly billowing shearow watching through the window — yet gave to all of him — a firm glance at the cloudy mottled bluish thing far off with its jagged dot seen like a thrust through a break in the cloudiness of the lopsided hemisphere which (having so termed the cloudy mottled thing) he saw it was — so seeing it he named it what it was: the gibbous Earth.

But second, he saw that, now calmly orbiting, the IMP had now stopped. That is, spinning.

Jolts and all.

Which stop he announced to Ground yet saw then what this seeing meant: that that prior equilibrium yielding a view of gibbous Earth and a still stranger completion of what had proved suddenly partial in the wild jam and throw spinning and kicking him down out of his bright shell of synchronous orbit, had been nothing like the true halt the IMP had now reached at a velocity not only greater than the former 1.9 of synchronous orbit 22,300 miles from Earth but greater than the 2.4 he had given Ground in case of eavesdroppers, never thinking Ground would act to make not just the camouflage at once come true but velocities still greater which threatened him with Earth and brought on new cycles of dark and light that divided and divided times until Ground came and went like a pulse of pulses.

He could not think. Or, not as he would. For Ground asked what spin Imp Plus meant, and asked Frequency check complete with Operation call letters all over again.

But then Ground asked how had Imp Plus stabilized IMP’s attitude.

Imp Plus found the firmness to think as he would. To think of that first equilibrium: it continued: it had seemed a counter-turn inside Imp Plus recalling the current that cascaded a tissue of spindles along an upstream middle, though when the tumble stopped, the equilibrium held; so he would have thought it to be disengaged from the rest or circuit or lattice of himself had not this poise been also lattice. And also not separate from the bed, banks, bones, field, and hardening lights it had seemed to be disengaged and disinclined from.

But the bones and Ground would not let him think as he would about this beautiful gyro-norm he had made himself amid the former jolting spins. But now he saw that that was what the diametrical morphogen-axle and the salt-sheathed faldo-shear spine were: they were bone.

Did he wish a return of the jolting to set wheeling these bone-lines that intersected but at no center for he had none? Such spin would show again how free from it all his new-found equilibrium was. Yet if by being in the equilibrium he could then have left the spin to kick itself down stairwell after stairwell of burst orbits, still the spin unquestionably had stopped; and Ground’s queries like shadow went round this unknown while they went round also what Imp Plus saw for himself: that contrary to what the Good Voice had said attitude stabilizer had not been under dual control.

Ground had planned to have it all.

But he said to Ground now neither that attitude had been under dual control — nor that it had not. He tried to think as he would. He tried to contemplate the poised moments of force compounding the interior equilibrium — that interior and multiplied division of spirals that also stood still in their own no less breathing braids. Yet try as he would, he no more lost Ground than he could unbind the calcium and phosphate salts from the protein fibers they made bone, nor than unbind these two settling bones of his from the differences between their ends. He had to begin in his own way but knew what would be, and partly because the beginning was not now but long before.

He timed the following momentous transmission:

IMP PLUS TO CAP COM. NERVE FIBERS INCLINED TO ORIENT BY CONVERGING ON CENTERS OF GROWTH THAT ARE ACTIVE. VISION HARDENING TOWARD MILKY AND TOWARD BONE, CAP COM, BUT A WHILE AGO GIBBOUS EARTH WAS VISIBLE THROUGH WINDOW BY MEANS OF SHEAROW MEMBRANE. ALSO SEVERAL ELECTRODES ADRIFT ARE VISIBLE AS IS BRAIN HOUSING ADRIFT.

He had timed this transmission to end as one of the new dark cycles enveloped the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. But tremors answering from Earth bent round the rushing waves of dark and he would have it his way after all and he would think as he would whatever he had his way.

He missed the Sun. He saw sand. He saw reflectors dug in holding the Sun among the sands — dividing and multiplying the Sun. He saw Ground divided.

So that he would know himself, Ground must know him.

He wouldn’t really see himself reaching Ground but he could see himself dividing Ground. He had a force he had not had and did not know; but he did not have the give that he had had. He’d felt this during light as well as dark. He had, he saw, passed through many darks lately — the briefer darks of his lower orbit. But then through these more frequent darks he had felt alien pulses go in the slivers that were adrift. The slivers hung like flameless candles, length illumined by Imp Plus — by star-pocked polyp-scales that all across his sight membranes in curls and subsiding spikes jelled toward horn.

He did not know how long the dark cycles were.

Yet how then — while he would seem not to know each time just how long Ground could go on receiving and answering him before a new dark came between — how had he timed his transmission to end at that point? He’d timed more than one, he now saw, or was seen. Was seen.

Was seen by the crimson glimmerings he’d described to Ground; was seen — or not seen — by the glial and neuronal cells no longer regressing to glioblast and neuroblast in order then to multiply to more and yet more glia and neurons; was seen by now-homogenized fragments of what he could only describe to Ground as a once-central, once-flaming gland; was seen — or at any rate held — among other, slowing elements by the ambering Sunbraids that moved no less fast than before among his substance: his substance that itself no longer shifted except to breathe spiral waves round its lopsided limits. And these seemed as easy to describe to Ground as their wending origins were hard — and harder still the gathering into their functions of the faldoream languor, the thought of leaping shearow, the morphogen prods’ lasting inclination.

But the two bones! What did they do in their loose, lopsided X-shape, and where did they go? They had differing ends.

The Sun came round.

Whatever the IMP’s attitude with respect to Sun and Earth, two of Imp Plus’s crossed bone-ends lay away from the one window, and two lay toward it.

Inside the hot and hotter capsule, he saw the window had been altered. One clearness had supplanted another, which had slid away like rain.

He tried to tell Ground a number (yes, a number) of things. What was yes? He felt ahead of him without finding its words a thing above all other descriptions that he must tell Ground. But Ground made no response to wending or morphogen, faldoream or shearow, water level or once-flaming gland — though the crimson flashings, Ground said, might be mere memory or trace particles from space. Ground asked so often for orbital speed and call letters: until, through these words with nervous Earth that were more empty than silence, Imp Plus saw — and crimson flashed as he saw — that alien or blind as Ground must think him, Ground must at last ask, What growth, Imp Plus, what growth?

Crooked question, divided question, for Ground guessed that the transmission from Imp Plus was an alien monitor’s. But over growth the division of view would be greater still. Yet just as Imp Plus would think as he would, so too he would make divided Ground see him.

And now, monitoring this outgrowth of what Earth’s central nervous system called fine movement, the crimson came forth doubly aligned along both bones as far as their crossing point. But from that crux, it so leapt on alone that it bisected the remaining space between the windowward lengths of morpho-spine and of whorled faldo-shear. And he knew it would tell him what he did not know he knew — but this he had not quite retrieved. For what the crimson line — twine — skein — glowed — melted into sight (or was it being?), went on he could not tell how long; for besides having already winked red where morphogen-knobs joined inner to outer wendings, it lasted, in his tingling touch of it, beyond whatever bodied insight he had of it at the moment when the crimson flash became now first fork and then a joined line and twine and coil that, on closer look, constantly unstranded and stranded and was pieces and gaps of itself, in which if there had been a point in doing so, Imp Plus could have sighted limitless disjoining.

Yet taking no microsight, he saw some end. It was so magnified he knew again how small he was. Even how small he was long ago under a high, huge roof. Its inside had been ridged and crusted with tracks and levels and hooks. A roof whose floor was underfoot. While looking at the IMP his cylinder — hardly a “Platform”—he heard the Good Voice announce to him its precise height and heard a voice answer that that precise height was roughly (as was the voice) his own.

But what end, or end of what, was magnified? And what made him imagine he remembered what the crimson was? And like the strange timing of his momentous transmission not long ago, he thought himself from one end of it to the other by way of what its strandings, unstrandings, loosenings, tightenings, coilings, uncoilings, recoilings lighted up — and by his origin and what was in back of it.

An end of what? Suddenly now an unforeseen end: of thinking he had not made an error in giving himself away to the Project. For what if he had held back and then recovered and had grown whole again: or at most propelled himself around without a skin or brain: or, legless, lived on his fingers: or advanced through normal Earthly life headless, as if bearing a black hole in last night: or like a figure he’d seen somewhere with a hole through his middle bevelled like upholstery round the edges so it seemed the absence of a cushion. But if on Earth he had recovered from irradiation instead of now waiting in the brain of Ground for a recovery area, he would not have grown.

Except old.

But how old?

And how old was he?

Ground did not answer his data. Ground must think what it would. About how he lived here, what he did for water and food. Ground could be now as silent as the dissolving dark had once been. Ground must think what it could about what Sun did to water and to brains. But was Ground mad? Had Ground been reconstituted? Imp Plus did not know mad; but Imp Plus had thought it when at some time past Ground had said, what Imp Plus had known Ground would say, though now Imp Plus rarely heard direct message words: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, WHAT IS LICKING? WHAT IS LICKING? OR IS IT LICK OR LICKS? WE DO NOT READ.

He had told Ground (how long ago) that the flaming gland had dispersed, been licked up and absorbed, and that so had the hypothalamus — what he’d thought to be that — with its many controls — or were they forces — of pain and pleasure, cold and hot, appetite.

But lack of response from Ground was not why he didn’t now tell what the crimson strand’s loosening and tightening illuminated. The reason why held him between itself: so it was some likeness between seeing and himself. For in the radiance breathing from the crimson strand’s loosening and unstranding, or breathing then in the loosened, half-melted strand’s self-clutching return to its tight spiral coil, he found the great lattice colonies now unmoved, and he saw he had let his own spiralling deceive him. For the colonies were a fixed mass, a high block of lattice bleached blue and green, a coral as pale as the odd force of discolor long ago noted in the optic chiasma now dispersed along with flaming gland and hypothalamus, and all else, into this fixity. This fixity was layered with the folds of conical wendings, folds of elongated morphogen-nodes and of faldoream-ridges, folds of shearow. For all these four kinds were now a hard translucent record of their former life; they were not moving now; not moving even where they wove round the upper cables and also round those lower tubes in which there was still seed motion, tubes he had feared for in his muscles when Ground had sent the jolts.

His cells were a place for motion — that was it.

The ambering Sunbraids were everywhere in his fixed cells; and through these motions he could feel that the cells were holes held in a lattice, and were the lattice too; but they were also locus timers for tides of Sunbraid which were now harder to see although he felt no less timed or clear. The lattice was a field of times. He was as much the motion as its place. And the crimson process radiating (in his mind?) out from the two crossed lengths of bone which whorled hardness outward like light, illuminated the great lattice by driving the Sunbraids through the holes and beyond to the edges of himself where the equilibrium he must make Ground understand whirled its gyro-norm of seeming substance; but this was only part of the cycle, for then either the Sunbraids were sucked back by the crimson process tightening and restranding itself or they were themselves the cause of this helical recoiling.

Yet also both. Both. The word repeated, for he knew that he must hold on to whatever shot back and forth through a long ellipse of new pain — in order to see what this was inside the pain. Must hold on to. Or be held. Must hold on against new noise. Message pulses from Ground. Hold or he’d lose it. Lose what? Yet he did not have it: or he did: he had it to lose. Or had always had — even before radiation poisoning on Earth had had it: and now in the quantum moment at which he saw the secret mass of understanding, or rather saw he was the secret understanding, between the Sunbraids and the resilient strand, another thing happened: the wending-spirals round his edges were fading into fixity, fixed lattice, and he saw that their circuit had been fed by this bellows action between Sunbraids and crimson strand, which he now in the absence of that wending life could see shot back and forth and always had: and he saw on Earth a new jagged dot but a dot of particles that enlarged to his sight as if the old messy task of dissolving bodies into particles to transmit them elsewhere and reconstitute them had been solved: but the dot enlarged only to a formed, forced, milk of particles, and this was the Acrid Voice Imp Plus had brought into being. Ground had permitted the Acrid Voice to speak to him again and to ask questions and swap data, for Imp Plus if he was to be still more must know the more that he had become. And in answer to the Acrid Voice’s transmissions on glucose, water, growth, and the radiant seeds that Imp Plus saw he’d struggled to keep moving in their lattice-hungry cascades — he wished to tell the Acrid Voice that what he had was foresight, yes, foresight: and he had seen his own.

But something came between.

Was it doubt about the great fixed lattice of himself?

For the last perimeter motions had faded.

No. Not doubt.

For here in this lattice whose three-dimensional field was exactly as regular as Imp Plus now saw (like more dimension) that it also lacked boundary — here in this lattice that seemed impure only in motion visited upon it — the motion was no longer the life of animal or vegetative or some wendo-zoan grip moving: but was instead the lights whose pieces were broken conversely back into streams of flow and bent and conducted into spirals of spirals by this lattice of himself.

He was now his thought. Spinal motion of Sun and cells gripped like a sheathing jolt a length of lattice, then was elsewhere like a star of spines still one spine moving like a scope beam.

But the exchange with Ground that he had foreseen and forced into being began now at the precise instant he came into possession of what he then knew he had also foreseen but could not say.

For the IMP now lunged free of its new road and fell off again into lobs of spin.

Yet these did not jar.

Though then Imp Plus began to wish they would.

His thought turned upon wonderful words that pulsed and passed between him and the Acrid Voice on a Pacific island.

But what was it that had kicked the burners on and shut down the attitude stabilizer? Imp Plus had to ask the question. For whatever Cap Com had done to stretch IMP’s perigee lower then lower toward some recovery space contained in Cap Com’s uneasy brain, Imp Plus felt he was the one who had done it, and had done it through the semi-conductor he’d found all over again he was.

Done what?

Become what he had foreseen.

Or tried to become. Did he try?

He saw the chalked ellipse, the Earth one focus, the other empty but there, the Acrid particles fingering a green blackboard.

And then the particles of the Acrid Voice came together and Imp Plus saw the Acrid Voice as if it were his own particles. And the Acrid Voice said: WHAT GROWTH IMP PLUS, WHAT GROWTH?

12

So he began to answer and to ask. And while the IMP twisted, tumbled, spun, and pushed into lesser orbits, Imp Plus talked to the familiar ovals of the Acrid Voice. And not knowing where to begin, he used old words the Acrid Voice used. Words sometimes that the Acrid Voice had been going to use. But more wonderful than this in all the words that passed was what they lacked. It was far more than the words were equal to.

Imp Plus felt it all around. If he did not wish to tell Ground that what had been at first a body grown like a starfish of mouthless hydra seemed now other than body, wish faded into inability which was in turn only a shadow thrown by his sense that he could preserve what the Sun hoped they might become.

He looked ahead to what would be; and then — already there — he would look back from all he half saw he had become. To find all those words to be just pictures that fell as short of what the words inclined to point to as the Acrid Voice’s new-gathered body-particles were beyond that body Imp Plus had once shared with the Acrid Voice. That is, two bodies, but alike. Now, faced with the question What growth? Imp Plus did not know where to begin.

But he would know what he had become — not half know but wholly. For to know what was his, he must know the more that he’d become. So he talked to the Acrid Voice, while the Acrid Voice answered with questions and answers. Which were better than what had come before from Ground. For then Ground had said only that the crimson flares now stranding and unstranding might be trace particles from space. But now the Acrid Voice went further and Imp Plus replied that though sometimes he had to guess if the IMP was hot, yes when the crimson increased so did the heat. The Acrid Voice—

It was the Acrid Voice, the Acrid Voice as it must have been but only now was seen: Imp Plus knew because of the remembered salmonella detail, but more because he saw the Acrid Voice now dissolved into a milk of particles firing in steady, interrupted ovals struggling but firing, as if the Acrid Voice had caught some of the radiant motion that had first brought Imp Plus to Travel Light.

He wanted to say this and ask if the Acrid Voice had had cave-in or cave-out pain and say, too, that through a long ellipse of new pain a thought shot back and forth that must be held on to. Shot between IMP and Earth. But he would not find words equal to this or to this power’s heart that was (or was in) the suck of breaths holding the field that was the preserving future of the same breaths between the crimson strandings and the Sunbraids.

The new pain was not a burning, but he wanted to lose it. Lose it as smoothly as glucose shone in streams up the tube from the plant beds. But telling the Acrid Voice about this glucose movement, he knew the new pain promised more of itself. And Imp Plus saw not only that the Acrid Voice must ask how he saw; he saw when the Acrid Voice would ask. But Imp Plus saw that to lose this pain he might have to lose also the chance that it sprang as much from the use of this power shot forth to a divided Ground and back, as from the act between Sunbraids and crimson. This act was more than a blowing and sucking of Sunbraids and a helical recoiling in the crimson process: the act included the great lattice too whose fixity was beautiful where light thought its way through, invited, uninvited, but not in vain. For this light that was the new pain and was the new beam oscillant between here and Ground also here and now combed the lattice cells into sight, feeling, constant change whose forms of particle motion passed tongue through shoe and fire through tears, risking all he’d thought he’d lost but now saw flicker here and there with meaning whose power was their final loss.

These waves of the mutual light sifted one another like the rains drawn by horizontal winds. Rains he knew — but when he tried to explain he stopped before he started. This light he had or was in blew into brief view the lattice cells so they were felt to be massed shapes rather than veins of line nor like the beam that also would go from them here to Ground and back like a bodiless spine.

At one point in these massed shapes the Acrid Voice was observing that glucose had stayed at maximum. Which meant (the Acrid Voice observed) that glucose was being made in unthinkably greater quantity than would be explained by any known photosynthesis: Now granted the process was new (observed the Acrid Voice) of focusing into insulated parallels of flow oxygen and glucose here going side by side up the brainward tube — still, if something had happened to this glucose, it would more likely have burnt away against the oxygen than become more.

Imp Plus dreamed of a sleep in which he had known photosynthesis.

A divided sleep long ago in an orbit in phase with Earth’s GO-system, when he knew photosynthesis and used such words — a time when glucose was decreasing and he had been a Dim Echo of himself. Yet had also known with ill will and desire that photosynthesis even when it made sugar in the dark could no more save him than even the Good GO Voice had ever said it could.

And now as if the oscillant beam to Earth were the body of his despair over not being able to give what he knew was here, Imp Plus could no more show to the Acrid Voice those shadows that had once lengthened like cranes and contracted like elbows, than callout to the Acrid Voice that the word brainward was now wrong; nor show the Acrid Voice what Imp Plus had only half known he meant when he’d said GLUCOSE BEAUTIFUL (Ground’s word). He’d said it just now, it seemed; but really he’d said it many times ago through arcs of sugar raining light and color down the dark slides, through sweet muscles too that opened a rainbow flow to the chances of his own desire: the flow an aqueous humor on Earth while become here in orbit as if by his very seeing sugar food. If he would not communicate these strange things, still Imp Plus — his old hypothalamic control-gland dissolved into other being — did not cut off Cap Com’s commands that intruded on the Acrid particles. Yet he hardly knew what the point was of showing the Acrid Voice on this their private and direct particle-loop the spectrum of the small arcs and the gold shadow of the one big arc thrown by the Sun and its body and hand of light in Imp Plus.

CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, READ FREQUENCY, CALL LETTERS, AND WORDS FOLLOWING CAMOUFLAGE. Light found a pattern in the crystal cells: it was his plain reply but larger understanding. But to Cap Com he must speak in the old way by Concentration Loop.

Oh here was a test, a test like asking to identify what was located next to the gauge registering nitrogen reaction in the beds — namely, dilatometer registering liquid expansion.

How often had Imp Plus in answer said the frequency, the letters TL, and these test words such as Contingency Plan, seeing himself a ghostly camouflage in Ground’s uneasy mind? Did he then doubt also his equilibrium? For it could seem mere disengagement from the action of the IMP’s jolts of skid that jabbed new, lower and lower orbits each an ellipse, the diameter the pain, the foci Earth and the other — the other focus once empty on the Acrid Voice’s chalked board, now clearly Imp Plus and the Sun.

Or—the Acrid Voice had observed at another point — glucose maximum might mean on the contrary no glucose was being used, which could indicate Imp Plus was dead and speaking from beyond, or more likely had outgrown glucose — maybe water too — But NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE, Imp Plus heard himself say, like the lost Dim Echo. But say with such feeling that it seemed more and deeper than what he told the Acrid Voice was to be seen: namely, the currents in the tubes, of which the one that moved to him was a live line of glucose flooding up the duct from the dripping green, blue-green, damp-brown plant beds: for up in the substance of himself how could the Acrid Voice conceive of the arcs of lumen sugar and how they wheeled so beyond the desire of the plants that Imp Plus desired not to say it in words — he knew hate from the acrid green rooms — hated the Acrid Voice’s close attention now striving to receive and understand, and hated Ground because it would not see.

And so at one point in the shades of light that ran, sank, thickened, lived through (and seemed to soften into swarms, coils, and warp-blots) the hard lattice of himself, he did not explain his NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE: while at another point, layered above a moment’s sway of chalky, milky particles pulsing an Acrid Voice transmission so the Acrid Voice was there in the lattice layer itself — Imp Plus saw in the tube that came up from the plants a brilliance that was not glucose: it was light.

The glucose had stopped.

But the deeper feeling he’d had was all at once the layering knowledge of these layers: which was what he now saw he had meant when he had seen foresight: for just when the Acrid Voice in that very transmission asked how Imp Plus saw, Imp Plus found he was not seeing the stopped brilliance in the upward tube: but more: the shifts of substance had turned the membrane to scales and then lattice cells — and he had felt the tube stoppage not seen it.

What then, now, did he see? The brilliance he recalled.

Also the difference between Acrid Voice and Cap Com. Yet the one was right here in the reefs and wrapping warps the lattice made with the mutual light, and the other one — Cap Com — was not seen but was another way of speaking. But before and after Cap Com came between Acrid Voice and Imp Plus’s request to identify a flaming gland near the hypothalamus that had now been dispersed, Acrid Voice came between Imp Plus:

(between Imp Plus’s NEGATIVE NEGATIVE and his joint need to know how water kept appearing)

and came between his doubt that lumen arcs, thinking limbs, shifting substance, Sunbraids, and shearow, faldoream, morphogen, or wending could ever be communicated, and his request to know how his power could have been kept up:

the Acrid Voice came between not to ask again What growth? (for the Acrid Voice had asked this from its reconstituted particles on Earth and in several momentary areas shaped in the lattice light) but instead (O.K., Imp Plus) for reception by the many million cells conducting life from the mutual light with which they worked these chances: so, given (said Acrid Voice) this glut of glucose, given hence more than our and the Project’s chlorella could make between them, the photosynthesis must be abnormal and might be new: yet even so there would be water. But while the Sun can blow up clean energy, the Sun could never in a million years even through the nitrogen slides layering the IMP window make water by itself. SO—

besides despair and curiosity over the particles of recalled things now falling beyond grasp (for Imp Plus now found the Acrid transmissions again shaped in the layers of his own lattice cells while the oscillant Earthbound beam at the general bidding found and refound at each instant the chalky, milky ovals of particle that were the Acrid Voice on Christmas Island; and Imp Plus had swarmed into the Acrid guessworks to barrage them with a pointlessness equal to what, at this corner of any new lesser orbit the IMP tossed into, Imp Plus saw as a cooperative chaos of collusion: to wit, Cap Com’s Contingency suspicions plotting Imp Plus’s recovery, Travel Light’s Good Voice passing on to new projects, solar cookers in pueblos, the race for the Reversible Reaction, trans-world power ponds pooling greater areas narrowing greater space, the fight for power which was the fight to find, beyond perfectly imperfect semi-conductors or beyond an element out of which to make wasteless black bodies for solar receivers, the clue to Reactive Reversibility by which to bend spent Energy through the interface of its own use and thence refract it rewound rebound) — Imp Plus fell toward forms that inclined to hold cities and color, blood streams and water, yet forms that had their meaning in patterns of power holding an emptiness into which Imp Plus’s myriad crystal cells in this momentary shaping of despair could swarm the words SO WHAT—

one had to see (went on the Acrid Voice, having not stopped) an extra force at work that was another element that seemed beyond the sequence of the old Earthly words (but words which all the lattice cells in transpersed cooperation divided into meaning), an element or force precipitated by that which was close and was painfully obvious, precipitated in volume, precipitated in rains, Imp Plus, rains — precipitated winding among reams of what there already was — which the brain’s gray and white matter and a fine humor of cerebrospinal fluid—

And light! — the words met: the two words, but more two pairs — two lattice shapes layered one over the other: the Acrid Voice and Imp Plus said them together, so the very congruence of the pairs made them distinct, like…

The shade of collusion passed at a slant among the pale, hard cells. It multiplied or divided into change. Imp Plus was thinking: I have invented the inclined lattice. But (on the private particle-line direct between them) the Acrid Voice went on: and if this light from the Sun in the brain’s substance has body, the strange element precipitated in volume might meet this light — and had Imp Plus turned from heterotroph to autotroph? — if there really is water. And what growth, Imp Plus, what growth? — the words layered their light through what he thought, and the Acrid Voice asked again, and then asked if Imp Plus had possibly kept his power up through having compressed or compounded such sun-windings as the Acrid Voice had postulated, into focuses, focuses as concentrated as the techniques originally programmed through hypnosis for the Concentration Loop,

CAP COM TO IMP PLUS (came instantly the harsh TL line instantly spread in warps of lumen that gave the look of motion to the fixed prints of the fossil faldoreams once rippling the humorous distances among morphogen-knobs), DISREGARD LAST TRANSMISSION AS UNUSED CAMOUFLAGE MATERIAL FROM ORIGINAL CONTINGENCY PLAN, CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, POWER, GLUCOSE, WATER SHOW EXPECTED DECREASE.

But there is water, said Imp Plus as if to the Acrid Voice, and the familiar ovals struggling with their patterns of particle on the island of the Pacific responded. The struggle spoke but thought itself alone: The readings were not what Cap Com said, but how could the Acrid Voice transmit this—?

Imp Plus knew.

— or convey that Cap Com had ordered Acrid Voice to confine himself to getting facts from Imp Plus?

So Acrid Voice did not yet know it was actually communicating on a private line to Imp Plus!

Yet now that he could reach Acrid Voice only directly and not by Cap Com, Imp Plus wanted any paltry or false test from Cap Com — even a false test of alertness, to show the old loop mode still worked. But then this chance of losing Cap Com dispersed among the lattice layers, and somewhere Imp Plus had already explained that once unbound the separate atoms of the water molecule found themselves caught, spun, slung out, and blown round into spiring orbits by the Sun skeined upon his own sun, and they multiplied into a sky of birth so that when the now far more numerous atoms rebonded, water level had measurably increased, and perhaps Ground could tell why and tell if the difference between Ground’s and Imp Plus’s water reading was due to a Camouflage Contingency plan Imp Plus did not know about.

And although he happened now into a long dark cycle, Imp Plus found in shaped areas of himself that he had also said to Ground that the unthinkable amounts of glucose coming from the plant beds nonetheless did not begin to equal the glucose levels in Imp Plus, and all indications were that glucose, perhaps through priming from the brainward plant tube, perhaps through a winding process already indicated, was being produced directly in what had been the brain but was not the brain now for that was utterly changed.

A pause came from somewhere, and was in one place not another. And Imp Plus could not tell if what he had in momentary areas of lattice warp was the image of activity in Acrid Voice’s particles on the Pacific island. But the flattened long oval of their personal circuit embodied his own current ellipse so exactly he recalled dance—mapped on some sweet grid of humor for those coming after to follow.

And through the going darkness of the long cycle came instead of Acrid Voice Cap Com’s static division: between possible and alien, need and doubt: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, ROUTINE IN-FLIGHT ALERTNESS TEST: IDENTIFY PROJECT TL DIRECTOR BY NAME, COME IN IMP PLUS.

But as, in his layers, he felt like an opposite of jolt a slower fixity, though a finer fixity — earned — and knew he would give Cap Com another, better answer than what it wanted, he found what he had foreseen beyond the Acrid Voice’s main question What growth? that had been put into the Acrid Voice by Imp Plus. He found he had in one near-congruence of layers foreseen that he would not know how to answer the question.

And Imp Plus, who did not remember the other name of the Good Voice, answered Cap Com: THE ONE WE HAVE BEEN TALKING TO IS ACRID VOICE. REPEAT, THE ACRID VOICE.

On the Pacific island, ovals that felt like lost limbs yielded to bombardment, and this was Cap Com at the Acrid Voice, until WHY ACRID? came back from Ground.

But what Imp Plus had said had been the thing to say, because it helped.

For though Ground amid an accelerated swirl of reconstituted particles answered SAY THAT AGAIN IMP PLUS (and was ignored) Imp Plus knew that because the swirl of Acrid particles was more curious, to give the Good Voice’s name would have made Cap Com think then that the name had after all been known as far outside the tight security of TL as Imp Plus at this point was bent past the communication line from that dry island in the Pacific. Cap Com would learn now from Acrid Voice why “Acrid”; and, learning this, Cap Com would believe that the transmission came from Imp Plus, and would credit the water, glucose, and power data; and Cap Com would accept that Imp Plus had a way to communicate to that point in the Pacific during a long dark period.

But wait: they would not: wait: the Acrid Voice proper and Cap Com were together now.

Yet Imp Plus held with the particled Acrid Voice a private frequency, which the Acrid Voice still sensed as its own thinking on that island but which yielded for Imp Plus, here in the shaping play of lattice light slowing toward growing fineness of fixity, both the particled image of Acrid Voice and its responses in layers like foresight. But as Cap Com twined with the other, bodily Acrid Voice on the beam oscillant from the breaths between Sunbraids and crimson coil, the lattice fields of Imp Plus became aware of what they had always inclined toward: that their private beam to the particled Acrid Voice had been carried by the main skein of beam, not the other way round. But though twined upon that skein of Sunbraids and crimson coil, the voices unwound as the lattice cells desired. And the Acrid Voice in slow-massed figures of the mutual light was flowing faster and faster as if it might, by gyrolibrium, map one single field or solvent for all the events of glucose, water, sight (which the lattice layers were capable of recalling), and of the whole growth—What growth, what growth? — while when Imp Plus, as yet unwilling to give, like a positional fix, data on star arms that lived like unmouthed hydra, data on membranes that polyped on light and even on sight itself, increases through which his shifting substance had swelled and divided and multiplied, asked if it was conceivable for brain cells to go back into their prior embryonic forms in order then to yield exponential multiples before developing into adult form all over again; and the Acrid Voice observed that Imp Plus although transmitting almost too slowly for clarity again seemed to have seen the phenomena in question and added that in fact for some years—which years? thought Imp Plus — projects had sought to split the neuron though to his knowledge not the neuroglia, i.e. glial cells — Cap Com broke in again demanding to know what the word “WE” had meant in the transmission THE ONE WE HAVE BEEN TALKING TO, and Cap Com who might have sounded like the Good Voice if all the crystal layers of lattice cell had inclined to care, asked if there was someone else—something else — up there with Imp Plus, and asked twice more.

But the dark cycle was ending. The Sun warmed the strands. They breathed more easily with the braids. And while the lumen quanta streamed over the lattice, the Sun seemed now not so much fingers as palm. A palm or fist Imp Plus could collide with and carom off. A palm infinitely inclined and blindingly and vastly creased, and, whether by Imp Plus’s memory or foresight, a palm faintly cupped.

Not knowing the creases except that they were motion, Imp Plus nonetheless through them felt a shape of shapes among the lattice cells yielding the answer he needed, which old and new pain dissolved into itself to make an unknown between the Sunbraids and a fusion they almost embraced. But in the Acrid Voice’s continuing thought this answer’s question had been overlain and lost. The shape of shapes was that swirling chance he had inhaled in pale green rooms on Earth. Inhaled having seen through the particles of smoke. Particles which had come he now saw as much out of the strange voice with its fossil foci in an oval in an oblong green chalkboard as the smoke had come at his own ill body. He had seen through the particles to forms which were not beyond the particles — forms of acrid loss which if it could be made good could yield clear process but must be areas left truly empty by the loss which the stark voice had hardly sensed it meant in the ill will of Think what you’re going to lose. Words privately conveyed to Imp Plus, who coughed in time to a towering headache. And in that moment that was more like an area rising through his reddening throat to be in reality more a locus Imp Plus concentrated in his racing brain than ill will and a mad anguish over a future dead or vacant, so the one chased the other: he saw it now through the bone-hard energy of the lattice that was himself: saw the warm concentration of the moment in the pale green rooms fail or fall into this chase: so that the gap that moved between the chasing two became their multiplying.

But in whatever part of his cells Imp Plus was seeing this — it had foreshadowed itself in pale green rooms at the moment of entwined division, ill will, anguish, anger, and cascading inclination. The chase was in him, and the migration of the gaps drew — had drawn — into forms of process cleared of everything impure except ahead-thrown possibility whose locus was the paler and paler coral lattice in whose simultaneous community he passed — had passed — through what he was: damp muscles of light; rains of nourishing; caves of growth and of the emptiness brought into being by the very escape stretching over it; the look of thought standing dispersed; glucose made or thought along a pulse of rainbow color contracted across a pupil gap; forms of equilibrium he was more than saw amid the tumbling IMP attitudes of Ground’s unknowing plan; forms of stranded breathing within breathing in and in, and elsewhere paths of particles breathed through locks of light by oval power plants so nearly crossing the lives of brain and algae that in the shadow of the idea of green Imp Plus could seem to the Acrid Voice to be photosynthesic — and if heterotrophic at will, autotrophic in root form — seem, that is, to this stark presence that was yet another form, this Acrid presence transolved by Imp Plus somehow to particle patterns so like his own cascades of spindling axis-parts broken down into fresh motion that the Acrid Voice could look to Imp Plus like his own substance. But caves, color, form, power — now what he must have was the way to keep the more he had become — whereas the Acrid Voice seemed persistently to want that more.

Say that again.

The lattice absorbed the words.

The words went together into an unsaid emptiness where, having been said more than once before, they were left unsaid. Oh what did that mean? Anguish, anger, ill will, vacancy, pain old and new dissolved to make something between the Sunbraids and a fusion they almost embraced.

He was being thanked. For what?

Yes, a braid structure, the Acrid Voice agreed; and if visible, where? and did it in some way go with the previously mentioned red that increased with heat?

Imp Plus was being thanked for responding to say that again by saying — but it had been the lattice gathering — the pain old, the pain new — the Sunbraids and fusion and the something between.

He wanted to say cascades. He did not know himself even after the Cap Com voice stranded with the first stark friendly voice demanded to know what had ever been said about braids, and was Imp Plus telling them Sunbraids and the red had actually been seen?

He could not explain the sight membranes.

But they had been him. No, they were him now.

Cap Com was demanding again.

Now where was the other voice?

In the silence the lattice layers were busy. Somewhere hard to recover in the lattices the other voice out loud had asked what cascades. For cascades had been conveyed direct to the particles of Acrid Voice ovalling on Earth yet also here in the lattice as if parts severed there to be chalked up to experience had been in body still here too among the layers of charged, hard, blanched comb-work. And this time the particles of Acrid Voice had not said Say that again. For, having been said more than once before, say that again was left unsaid. There was static infecting the friendly particles; it was in a lattice layer and it was also on the Earthly island where the Acrid Voice was also a companion body working with Cap Com; the reason for the water remained unknown while each fresh ellipse slung the IMP harder at Earth; more static invaded the friendly particles; a voice was claiming that nothing had been said about braids or cascades; the lattice drew more Sun into what it and the Sun each seemed to want — an inward spiral like a compound eye hunting (though here was no more insect than vegetable); but elsewhere in the particles of Acrid Voice cascades swirled but did not stop the static: cascades and salmonella swirled but swirled inward among the particles’ own ovalling swirls yet the static came between and the static was from outside but not the pale lattice but there on the Earthly island; the photons spiralled inward compounded with lattice cells which could seem to move by holding motion — compounded into an eye whose corner by turning and turning hunted the place in the layers where one caving might lead past the pains of all that would be lost and on to all sweet humor in a sheer sea of Sun; but something came between and it was not the static but the thought that the static was Cap Com and that the friendly particles were in danger; and in a sudden spinelike move that the fixed lattice made by drawing Sun into a conduit to grip and jolt the Earthbound attitude circuit, the IMP was stabilized, its tumble toward Earth’s threat stopped, and lattice intervened between the friendly particles of Acrid Voice and the static which had to be Cap Com and thereupon from Earth could just be heard old words: Think what we’re going to lose.

The words were weirdly more known even than if one had said them. How so? Because they had been said to one.

Yet not this time.

Words shown by a shift of the friendly particles: as if one fold of ovalled ultra-crossings had given outward in a moment’s pouring lean: but those words Think what we’re going to lose which went not from but to Cap Com (how did one know they went to Cap Com?), went not in form of thought transmitted direct as to or from the friendly particles or thought existing as the new orbital altitudes were contained in inner thought, but as emanation launched from the friendly particles of formerly Acrid Voice’s thought into what the great lattice held as a circuit no stronger, no stranger than speech aloud by Acrid Voice to Cap Com.

The Acrid Voice needed more still. More help. The ovallings leaned out, for they flowed faster but to spill free of a center only to draw from it still tighter particling as if force were focus when, as an oval has not one focus but two, so this ovalling leaned or bulged outward at once on Earth and here in the lattice which felt in its layers both that great inflowering flight into a center, an absent center whose absence was made out of two foci dividing this absence between them — and in the same rush that great efferent flight away (by centrifuge — he recalled centrifuge—it recalled itself) for to get free was the point: but who? not just a skein of Acrid Voice: free of that lattice? Like skin out of brain? Neither. But a name. Things to be said if the name would come. Could be gotten out of the lattice.

What things? What name?

Cap Com spoke: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS. ORBITAL CHECK, WE THOUGHT WE’D LOST YOU. WHERE ARE YOU NOW IMP PLUS? DO YOU READ ALTITUDE?

Cap Com had been the one Acrid Voice had been speaking to when Acrid Voice had said Think what we’re going to lose. And it was from those friendly particles that the lattice had the altitude to give back to Ground. Slowly. So slow the old name Imp Plus said by Cap Com nearly escaped again. Which was not the escape that had been meant by what had wanted to get out. A wound could always be found to get out by. But where was one here? Imp Plus was what had wanted to get out of the lattice.

Or not out — out from under. Like a layer. Or to one side to speak to the Acrid Voice which would be then on another near side of the lattice and not in the way, speaking now over the main beam, breathed oscillant out from between crimson process and Sunbraids — speaking electromagnetic cascade (was that it, Imp Plus?) (the name again) and explaining that the dynamic decay process was as Imp Plus well knew having been an engineer (ultramicrons, reddening signs, the fence) electromagnetic cascade, an expelled positron seeking and finding an expelled electron to annihilate each other in a moment of violence yielding something.

But the old Imp Plus must say something, for help would come for the more that the lattice was only if the Acrid Voice knew the loss that went before the more. And from the lattice layer now was heard on Christmas Island in the Pacific without call names of sender or receiver the slow message that: the glucose did not go beyond what was in the tube that came from the plant beds, there was no glucose beyond that for there was lattice, there was lattice.

SAY THAT AGAIN.

Now the brain making glucose independently was a strange autotrophism (so said the “cascade” voice compounding words on the main Ground beam with others transferred direct from the particles). But no glucose in the brain at all meant here was autotrophism of a different water.

And harder to swallow (said further words passed also direct from the particles into whose thought they had charged in a volt the ever-present lattice held clearly as speech aloud from Cap Com to the Acrid particles).

But no brain, returned the lattice twice, no brain.

Whereupon, of answers swirled among Acrid Voice, Cap Com, reconstituted particles, and twin beams, one answer came most clear to Imp Plus:

IMP PLUS, IMP PLUS, SAY AGAIN, IMP PLUS, SAY AGAIN.

Hard, so hard. For what was that old name Imp Plus now in the face of the lattice layers?

Allowed. The name was allowed. But how?

Allowed by the lattice. But among the sprung swirls of the layers allowed what? inside a bright eyelid of layers successively imprinted with swirls of charge, allowed what? Hard to see: though then allowed was off to one corner of the lid, and was that heavier feeling, a gravity cubed, a cramped, clothed feeling, and coughing out of a winter throat into one hand that wasn’t the hand now let go by another hand hidden from a blind news vendor who had spoken to it as it then went away from Imp Plus toward somebody who approached who had let Imp Plus be there. No, not be there but be there with the hand that in its turn had been allowed to be with him: a child, a wintry kid, a headache, his child, a female with a pale throat unbuttoned to the wintry wind not red as she said his was — the throat he was going to lose — nor towering like his headache with its cascading allowance of connections shifting from what was unbearable only to what was unbearable turning through simultaneous spaces this eye the lattices compounded with the Sun to hunt what Imp Plus had been allowed to think led past one cave of pains to a humor of sea, the sea as long as space, but — no! — homed in on a memory of flame nearer and nearer to being seen by the inward spiralling compound eye which was only a part of the lattice layers. A scent of meal, of the dilute salt stuck into blood that was going gamy and viscous in the air. A smell of waste-pain. Or of growing.

And Imp Plus spoke slowly to Ground, and whether aloud or not he did not know. But knew he asked now what had been the flaming gland with the discolored crossing above.

But what was this the compound eye homed on, breathing near but then exhaling away like an elliptical orbit of whatever altitude? Not now a thing or gland.

For the brain was no more.

The substances had dispersed and re-formed, though with viscous, rank, strong process not smelled until now remembered.

But what the compound eye honed on was here amid the layers. It did not know what to call itself. Less towering, collapsing headache than its memory: thus also pain for its headlessness but a pain of such cascading wonder there was the recent memory of faldo-morph muscle laughing to foresee (layered still further back) a dim voice say the words Fifty percent pleasure fifty percent pain.

And Imp Plus found amid a warm woman’s seashore teeth mouthing Vanity the bad teeth of the news vendor biting the Atlantic wind, while I could have been a vegetable cut across Imp Plus’s remembered desire to follow his child, abandon Travel Light, but survive.

And at the selfsame moment that the Dim Echo was heard to say hypothalamus, the Acrid particles were seen to ask how had Imp Plus seen anything up there much less a discolored optic chiasma.

And now the great lattice was felt among its layers of cells to shrug and to exhale or decontract a muscle: shrug the spirally compound eye outward into reconstituents of oval that squared with this growing sense Imp Plus had: that he was allowed by the great lattice, only allowed.

Which he did not tell Ground. But to the glucose reading he added that water was now zero too but this was because it had become unnecessary.

Cap Com was saying Long time no telemetry on hypothalamus.

The lattice beamed to Ground that no hypothalamus existed now.

Imp Plus felt he too was nowhere. But then he found himself part of the Sun-wound oval of the lattice. At once he saw and could convey to the Acrid Voice — but did he? — that when the substance had shifted, the brain’s glands had been dispersed and absorbed. He heard the lattice like a sleep he was part of all around and in him say, No water needed.

Imp Plus came to be aware of not having existed. To be a gap. Not like the elsewhere that pain could wish for. Imp Plus was part of a foresight which was that he would again not exist but did exist now and would again. He was in other arcs of the oval and believed correctly that there were elsewhere other simultaneities like himself. It was an idea of them.

And he thought then that they were ideas or like ideas. And then he became aware of having just then not existed. And he thought he resisted a good in this. He wondered if the lattice layers knew Ground’s plan. Or could care. He had to tell all the truth he knew.

The Acrid Voice came along the lattice layers to say that if not both autotrophic and heterotrophic now, Imp Plus had been both in his time. But Imp Plus had been going to say that though no water existed now, water had existed once. And Acrid Voice nearby or congruent with this had said water had existed in Imp Plus but did not now.

Imp Plus woke to having not been; and at once felt the lattice convey to Earth the unthinkable news that there was no Imp Plus.

No Imp Plus?

BUT IF NOT NOW, ONCE (came the words — not from Cap Com, who said, What lattice, Imp Plus? — not from the Acrid particles, which wondered if the crimson and the braid structure persisted in the absence of glucose and water) — the words But if not now, once came from Imp Plus, and Ground said, IMP PLUS SAY AGAIN, and Imp Plus could not remember, except that while no help would come for the more that had become unless the Acrid particles knew fully the loss that went before the more, the truth was that this loss of water and of glucose had come late and went not before the growth of the more but after it.

What lattice? said Cap Com. What growth? said Acrid Voice. Why no brain? said Cap Com. Acrid particles? (thought the Acrid particles) — say that again.

Say that again.

And Imp Plus with all the force allowed by the lattice answered, THINK WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO LOSE.

So saying, he knew he had known for a long time they would lose him. Many times were spaced in the lattice layers but he had made his own instant-contingency camouflage: so he’d unwisely come to hold as sole truth these simultaneities that the lattice’s power could display in layers and motion. But they were not sole truth. For the Acrid Voice had said what Imp Plus had known: that if in his time Imp Plus had fed on others because not being able to use simple carbons he required complex organic molecules like glucose, and if in his time he had also on the contrary been able to make his own from sunlight — that is, if in his time he had been both heterotroph and autotroph — he had been one before the other, even if at some time both at once — he had gone from stage to stage. And these stages were now gone. Gone from him like the water which still occasionally dripped like an afterthought from the algae.

But Imp Plus knew that the losing to be done would be done by him. It had even now been brought back by him. From a towering pain that existed still in the absence of its head. Brought back in words that were themselves brought back as exactly as they were exactly reversed. For Say that again had been Imp Plus’s words on Earth, twice out loud, third time silent; and now, brought back by the phrase Acrid particles he’d thought forth to Christmas Island in the Pacific to the very being that the words Acrid particles named, say that again had come instead from the Acrid particles. And from Imp Plus now had come Think what you’re going to lose. Which was what the Acrid Voice had once said. In a pale green room. The one time Say that again had been unvoiced. For in the emptiness of that frequent, towering headache, some new membrane had sprung such a run of gaps chasing each other in him, that he could let a whole series of cascades take him through their annihilating yields: so that anguish over death had been camouflaged, yet also caused, by anger at the Acrid Voice’s supposed ill will, anger caused also by, yet also camouflaged by, Imp Plus’s own entwined ill will and desire in turn caused by, yet also camouflaged by, possibilities proliferating in the barrage of emptiness that was his towering headache: possibilities, chances, that took him apart from the wounding words Think what you’re going to lose as his memory took him now away from the Acrid probing and Cap Com’s threats — and took him almost away, yes, from war between the two.

War over him.

Over his past. Over his chances. What he’d fallen into.

After having made it out of mad anguish and inclined gaps that chased. Made it himself of some multiple twining that towered into headache, so he’d had to get to Sun and get to water. A twining in his head that primed what had been getting ready to happen. To happen whatever Earth did. To happen describable or not. He and the Sun described what happened. This describing was being. How could it be described like a cubed ellipse or a starfish-like hydra becoming four functions becoming what held and wholed them like remembered possibilities at will?

Yet the great lattice let him not forget the twining that had choked his head until it broke into the multiple gapping chase.

The twining here now at what Ground wanted to be the end of things was only a choking like the lattice whose idea he now was, clothing and dimming him. The twining now was with the Acrid Voice, for the Acrid Voice — the gibbous voice — had spun a net of map across the capsuled process of the last (how long am I into mission?) four months; and the Acrid Voice would not let up.

Also Imp Plus thought the lattice must have put him through nonexistence again. For he was missing now the means, whatever they had ever been, to distinguish the Acrid Voice on the main beam from the direct thoughts of its milky reconstituted particles on the other beam. Imp Plus wanted to find the foot he had put in the yellow leather shoe; to find the voice in which he had told the blind news vendor in that cold place on another sea, “That’s my daughter,” as she ran down the pavement to meet the dark-haired woman. He wanted to find the shouldered spine to be laughed up by the beach woman’s touch; find the eyes to see spilt blood, spilt smells, the point of jokes, things not so beautiful as what had come to him through growth that was now (he thought) possibly stopped. Yet the Acrid inferences would not let up; because Imp Plus recognized them. They pumped against his other gradient. Like what drew charged particles of sodium uphill through the skin of cells. Or like the very carbon atoms these inferences jumped through to get back to nitrogen, glucose, water, the crimson process that was more crimson when warm. Carbon, so small the shell of its electron cloud gets unthinkably close to the nucleus of other atoms; and so strangely able to both give up electrons and take them on that it can form bonds left and right.

But the growth, said Cap Com (but not on the beam!), the growth, the growth.

Now if out beyond the Earth (continued the Acrid thinking) the ten-times-greater carbon bombardment is largely lost on IMP’s shield, we still have solar wind.

But wait — who said anything about Acrid particles — braid structure — who is feeding you data the rest of us are not getting?

It was Cap Com speaking to Acrid Voice — Cap Com, who could not interfere with the Acrid inferences about rays from the Sun’s corona hitting plant-bed nitrogen to form carbon-14 or light quanta hitting carbon in the brain breaking bonds to make a new state so reactively rich in energy as to be new — but Cap Com did break in upon the Acrid questions asked of Imp Plus: to say, IMP PLUS WE QUESTION WHETHER YOU HAVE ANY POWER LEFT, READ ANY, IMP PLUS, ANY.

For though Imp Plus had barely answered the Acrid inferences these had transmitted data Cap Com might not wish to fall into the wrong hands — he saw hands moving away from each other: that research into brain-cell regrowth had seen far enough to see that the splitting of neurons led nowhere unless it was to some embryonic regress; that the lattice repeatedly referred to might be giving to photon potential a radically receptive new grid or charged fence; that the nitrogen window of the IMP might have accelerated carbon recompounding; that given a jump in glucose, hence a jump in oxidation and energy, the sodium pump would work harder and faster, the sodium concentration be even more unequal either side of the cell with increase likewise of potassium, which binds and hence may bear upon growth just as the resting membrane potential caused by uphill sodium flow may relate growth to electrical power.

But asking again about the braid structure and whether in the absence of glucose and water this lattice could be organic and if not what of the crimson process, the Acrid transmissions went away, went away with some breath of Imp Plus.

There was nothing, then.

And afterward Imp Plus saw there had been not even a memory of the suns, his own which was now the lattice’s, and the great Sun.

For Imp Plus had been blinked out by the lattice. The lattice evolved from Imp Plus had taken Imp Plus in. Such a way in he had been forgotten. Which he knew, having been brought back. For he was back but into — for the IMP was into — a new driving stumble. And as if Imp Plus had been given by the lattice knowledge necessary to it as an idea, Imp Plus knew that the fading form of the spinelike conduit leading as if to Imp Plus himself though he had no place, had been the lattice destabilizing the IMP to show Cap Com the real power still here. But from Cap Com’s response Imp Plus knew it had been a several-times-on-and-off demonstration and thought again of where he could have been and the thought came with what he took to be a memory of pain because it felt like understanding and relief, and the understanding sucked into it the dream he thought he had had while just now not existing, and it was that he would die but the others would be there, Cap Com, the Acrid Voice, the Acrid particles, the great lattice, and the Sun. For was his growth not over? And was he not at the mercy of the being he had once become only then to lessen into a part of?

No dream. It was that last breath Acrid Voice had taken away from Imp Plus.

But the Acrid word had been fence—a new grid for photon potential. To receive rays. A brain. No, the lattice the brain had become. Imp Plus had recognized so much of what the Acrid had said that he had been he saw one reason the Acrid had not let up. But had let up now, and only dimly did Imp Plus hear the war on the Ground.

He tried — did the lattice let him? or in some new power he had, was he the gift which the lattice was glad to allow? — to push one more time the phototelic beam to the particles of reconstituted Acrid Voice, to try to say what he did say: Your enemy Cap Com is right: you are being fed data that Cap Com and the others are not getting: it is a force of concentration gradient far greater than any loop you think still operates here. You don’t know exactly that this is what is happening, but you incline and you recall and you know — you know—

He could not complete.

He did not know why the lattice did not restabilize the IMP. The spine of power conduit felt closer, but Imp Plus did not know if it still gripped the attitude and retro rocket systems. Ground had dropped the orbit still more.

Getting back to Earth was the journey. Or Earth’s crust of atmosphere. The memory of morphogen-knobs made the memory of wendings shake so hard that the shearows and faldoreams cast shadows nearer to confirm this a monitor-compound of humor over what was ahead: a landing: a soft landing to feel out the surface: acres of radiant Sun-collectors, desert spectacles with monitored properties, gibbous Earth with that jagged dot he could nearly recall.

The Acrid — the friendly — particles did not return Imp Plus a message. But Acrid words aloud with Cap Com were real enough, telling in detail what was in danger of being lost. And the threat to cut off the Acrid Voice from this and future projects beamed out to Imp Plus like the false Sun of some other day when he’d let himself be scoffed into thoughts of survival. Was it the Good Voice thwarting the Acrid? Imp Plus did not know — for he was tired, or the lattice let him feel tired — but now in a last try that made him suddenly doubt he could ever show the Acrid particles the telepathic — he knew telepathic—beam between them but made him think that he and the lattice could go on together for a long time, he broke into the Acrid Voice’s protest before it had finished as the Acrid Voice said We must go on—

IMP PLUS TO GROUND, IMP PLUS TO GROUND. WHAT HAPPENS TO BRAIN’S THREE-DIMENSIONAL MAP OF RETINA WHEN NO RETINA IS LEFT TO PLUG INTO? WHAT HAPPENS TO FLAMING GLAND BELOW DISCOLORED OPTIC CROSSING WHEN BRAIN DISPERSES? HAVE SEEN AND BEEN BUT DO NOT KNOW.

He had them again, he thought; and he went on. The lattice, he felt, also wished to know; or Imp Plus was one part of the lattice’s wish. But answering Cap Com that the sight he had had had been solid yet possibly not had but something else, Imp Plus saw into the flesh of his past motion: only deep enough to think what would make them believe. Yet then deep enough to let him feel further, as if a sliver had been implanted in him out of sight by him himself., why did he want them to believe him? So they would not kill him? They had their reflectors cooking water in villages, smoking in the deserts of the gibbous Earth. Maybe not gibbous now, where from orbit the one familiar mark had been the Great Wall of China, he knew for never having seen it before. And the search went on for the intermediate compound — he recalled that! — that might store electrons dislodged by radiation — how much later? — after some Sun-turned molecular change and the evolution of light these particles could produce thermoluminescence — when let go, like birds, thoughts, micropumps primed by future chance, infinitesimal maps seeking a place to be of.

But then as if making visible what might have gone by telepathy to the Acrid particles, Imp Plus put to Earth the question WHY DO I WANT YOU TO BELIEVE ME?

Yet as he spoke, and received a host of questions alternately from Cap Com and the Acrid Voice — did he have any waste to get rid of from this body they didn’t yet have a clear picture of? had he actually seen neuroblasts back-formed or reverse-embryo’d from mature neurons and what was solid sight? — fatigue choked him and he wanted the lattice to locate for him in himself his own answer to his own question skewering him as an electrode had once skewered a membrane and made it dilute.

The body did not exist now. It had opened from the brain’s folds. (Cerebral body? Brain bairn?) Perhaps, but it went on to shift with the brain into an undivided substance. (Where’s the power coming from? But the solid sight — is there power there?)

The memory of anger and dread choked him toward merging the voices of the question. But he had to divide them, one from the other. Cap Com bursting ahead, Acrid Voice trying to understand.

Yes, there had seemed to be power in the solid state. The limbs had changed, but for a long time they’d had, or even been, membranes. Cloudy as the hemisphere adrift, silky and slick and of a power that was not the same as the contractile sheaths of length by which the photovoltaic power system was supported and even replaced and through which the attitude control system could be engaged at will. (You’re controlling it right now, aren’t you! YOU KNOW I AM NOT. YOU KNOW I AM ALLOWING SPIN, TUMBLE, ORBITAL DECAY.) (But the membranes — what did they do? And if powers of contraction and release, contraction and release exist here — the words carne to Imp Plus not as an Acrid question but as an Acrid thought unspoken — then ATP is being turned by hydrolysis into ADP, which means that actomyosin is coming from somewhere.) Well, what the membranes did was more than Imp Plus could tell. They had been four, when the limbs had been four hydralike spokes, four routes leading to cliffs, four necks reddening and paling, reddening and paling. Sight had been multiple or central or both. Sights of one or many came simultaneously from many angles and distances. (Like bits into a computer? But you also saw small and inside, yes?) Yes. The Sunbraids urging the bodies to split; the optic nerves seeking sideways out of the tract and into gray areas; bodies breathed down a chain to squeeze through a bending membrane screen but by becoming bigger not smaller; water in the plant beds divided into what it once had been and multiplied and re-formed so it was more; the green that was blue-black; the yellow-soak along a seam at the rear of what had been the brain, yellow that fluoresced — yes — he stopped — yet when the woman’s repose acted upon him he inclined to know he only projected that yellow with his sight — his sight only a reflector of the yellow of the flaming gland’s power.

Nothing came back to him. Had the lattice dissolved his existence again or was he waiting for Ground to finish dividing what he had said and said to be believed?

He could never explain how his sight had dispersed into true multiples beyond center if not locus.

But why should even he believe the yellows he’d seen? Who had seen them?

Or the crimson.

The Sun had come round many times. The Sun went round the IMP, and the IMP went round the Earth, and the Earth went round the Sun.

It was not Cap Com speaking of the crimson. Cap Com needed to know how finely Imp Plus controlled the IMP’s attitude power, and Imp Plus asked for a full range of descent angles and their effects; then two voices seemed to skein together and Imp Plus could hardly pry them apart; for the Acrid Voice was saying that if the yellow-soak had appeared on the join of what had been the brain’s halves (had been! — for the Acrid Voice believed what Imp Plus had said! believed the shift from brain to material beyond), then this location indicated that this yellow was the hormonoid serotonin which if increased might account for Imp Plus’s apparent sleeplessness.

Voices tangled where Cap Com was in the midst of not only saying cell respiration had already been seen by electron microscope, but also giving Imp Plus an angle reading for re-entry. Through this choking garble Acrid Voice was saying that, when heated, letters Imp Plus did not understand turned red — not Vitamin D but D and N and A—and while Imp Plus was not clear if Cap Com wanted to convey re-entry angle or drown out the Acrid guess that the red was a double spiral stranding Sunlight, now without question but by question someone believed Imp Plus, who now had no doubt that the plan was to try to recover him, no doubt that the ovalling maps of sound took in new alien frequencies, and no doubt that the secret (though now, like a great breath, not the only) reason he had wanted to be believed was to get from Ground not the angle for re-entry but, given a burst of inclined new velocity, the angle at which Imp Plus amid the great Sunbound lattice in turn within the IMP would carom off the Earth’s returning atmosphere and at some oblique angle slide off into deep space if not into the creases of the great Sun’s hand.

But in telling of the membranes and how they unfolded, in telling of another not so solid leaning of his sight that seemed a mutual inclination into emptiness that was a chance of place which force inclined to find, he thought he saw that he had been with — or been — his sight, not had it. And that was gone, like glucose, like water, like all but the memory of those wendings, faldoreams, shearows, and morphogens that could please him with a clear play of being, former being, being inclined.

In some memory of the Acrid particles he was nonetheless receiving Cap Com’s admission that even with the tightest security he might have learned of a pituitary tumor — and that a tumor of the pituitary gland results in discoloration of the optic chiasma.

But the Acrid Voice would not let up:

Pituitary disruption, though, could not account for growth like this.

Like what?

More than brain, more than body, other than either. Imp Plus could not see the Sun. He was blind. He tried to see how far away Cap Com and Acrid Voice must be from each other.

SAY THAT AGAIN ACRID VOICE.

But Imp Plus did not exactly hear the answer more than brain, more than body. For he had found his way back to that moment that now grew to take in a green room and the Acrid words No telling what the Sun will do up there — don’t listen to all they tell you next door, and to take in smoke winding into sinus and the words I’m ill and an ill being divided by an ill will that suddenly was his too, but, more, was aimed beyond the smaller green room; and in that moment when he’d been drawn into some greater range through a mutual torque, he had refrained from saying Say that again—an emptiness of reciprocal failure to be remembered between them in which they began to share if not know what was escaping each other’s thought.

And with such torque in mind, Imp Plus tried to tell the Acrid Voice of the breathing between the helical crimson strands and the Sunbraids, how they hit each other, drove, swelled, loosened, and threatened and reskeined as if no breath generated but to more future, and he saw now that he had already heard this cadence of potential and loss.

Cap Com’s commands passed through the ambering ovals of the lattice and were not found by obedient or other reactions in a one-time control center but felt as known — the knowledge of that now-dispersed center’s name, hypothalamus, and its near neighbor the flaming gland — knowns not equal but equable: thus Cap Com at a closing but now pointless distance:

Re-entry window narrow.

Recovery area no longer secure. Stabilize, please, Imp Plus. Countdown to manual stabilization. A ripple up the memory of a spine.

Cap Com confused secure with secret. Words dispersed. Imp Plus heard the future tuning the past as the Earth fell toward him. Others tried to reach him. But the chance of angles that would neither bring IMP in nor burn it up, but carom it off along a long clarity of sliding space to be chased by interceptors whose own contingency launch plans at this moment were riding at their own mad cost into position — this came to Imp Plus not from all the others trying to reach him to get him and see him, but from the Acrid particles that knew so much — knew what was then suddenly shared up the spine of their private beam in Imp Plus’s thought that he would not be a bone of contention.

Cap Com vouchsafed the new Contingency Mode.

But the Acrid Voice had intervened; and in this brief break the words that went through the lattice wheeled as if to pass on by reflection to the Sun — seeking a future. Sought it in two foci drawing between them from past to future a memory of Imp Plus.

It was the radiation sickness. It had found and been a window to reverse itself. Reverse what had always happened: what should happen: for ionizing radiation rams out electrons, wrecks molecules, switches their cells which die.

But cascade had been turned around.

The radiant poison found its host potioned how? So its host was able — how? — to chase parts from particles, cadence from decay, to grasp a dispersion that was always breathing contagious divisions into loci that then freed contagion to multiply its touch.

So this had been the other sun. Imp Plus’s sun. Escaped from the very radiation that had escaped into him, flooded him.

KEEP IN CONTACT IMP PLUS. PLEASE CONTACT GROUND.

Words came also from the Acrid particles: beta emitted from carbon-14, calcium-45, strontium-90; gamma slowing to attach to an atom; radio-isotope tracers in the blood; fences flowing through blood: words from the Acrid particles bombarded one slope of the lattice layers finding there one small and signal orbit now lessening: and as it lessened, this orbit that had been Imp Plus gave off into the Sun feelings that were their own response: the Sunbraids had glanced wildly, had they not? were a wonder, were they not?

But to the Acrid particles went other questions: the Sunbraids had joined out of desire and bleeding anguish broken by blood’s absence — out of a breathtaking inclination between their spiral and the crimson memory of the future: did this all go out the window with the water, glucose, semi-conductor volts, and the dissolving and reconstituting swirls and milks of particles?

To the lessening orbit in one slope of the lattice layers came an answer from the Acrid particles: that is, questions fed back by what (alone with the Acrid Voice) Imp Plus (before he had been Imp Plus) had almost known once in a small green room like an idea:

Reciprocal focusing — yes, reciprocal focusing on what was not there: namely, the Other: which was the absence-to-be of Imp Plus’s body.

But what focus (asked now the Acrid particles) had turned radiation’s breath out of poison into seed? how had the speed of this contaminant light wound to itself such streams of photons from the Sun? but now what focus (for, having stood up and looked down at white data blinking on a green screen, the Acrid Voice felt in his height a shadow of annihilation recede into recent memory), what focus had drawn their minds so close — so close to fusion?

Down into the cloudy shell of Earth on the main frequency went the words THOUGHT FELT LIKE IT, and if such words went from the great lattice which now stabilized the IMP, the words passed on Earth as those of Imp Plus.

The same voice — it equalled its clear words — answered Cap Com’s transmission DO YOU HAVE POWER (that came twice again — a past blankly out to refract a future) DO YOU HAVE POWER?

YES AND NO.

But to the Acrid ovals pierced by static from Cap Com’s grasshopper elbows on an island in the Pacific came a power raised to wholeness, raised by camouflage that was not other than the words the Acrid particles alone received now: Have they power to intercept a deep-space trajectory?

Answers swarmed the lattice, but whether from the Acrid friendly Voice on the island or from the questioner in narrowing orbits could not be told.

The questioner? His name had gone, he was still he, he swarmed with answers and doubts. He foresaw a fiery carom, he saw his own IMP containing the lattice like a planar field step into space so deep its garden of foci grew an endless orbit stranded helically of helium and positrons — and he was drawn by this chance until he saw that it really was his if he wanted. But then he thought of the Acrid particles on the island below and thought that what he and they had together drawn into a circuit of conception could best hold elliptically distinct if he became an absence.

The IMP must hit Earth’s outer atmosphere neither to skip off into space nor trick the fire of those first frictions and slip through to recovery in the sea airs of the Pacific.

The lattice dipped pale and still and contained what it yet might not wholly have: an idea of itself: itself not wholly self-possessed, for a power of it beamed to and fro from Earth, a line-thin loop of particles so fine they gave back sight to the Sun.

Into the Acrid ovalling particles on the Pacific island came a power raised to wholeness by camouflage: camouflage not other than the dim, distinct transmission from space, as from the open center of an idea: No desire to carom into space, no desire for re-entry: camouflage received by the ovalling particles like the breath of thought: thought knowing that the hot crash of what was broadcast as re-entry static was not re-entry — the IMP had burned up in the first friction of the atmosphere: thought wondering then what chances now turned upon this fresh absence that would be as lasting as the glint of its arrival must have been brief for any who saw it in the sky: thought wondering, too, if at the last the great lattice had let this happen or had been surprised.

Joseph McElroy is the author of nine novels—A Smuggler’s Bible, Hind’s Kidnap, Ancient History: A Paraphase, Lookout Cartridge, Plus, Women and Men, The Letter Left to Me, Actress in the House, Cannonball. Also two novellas, Preparations for Search and Taken From Him (available as a Kindle Single), and a volume of short fiction, Night Soul and Other Stories (Dalkey). A volume of McElroy’s essays, Exponential, has been published in Italy and in expanded form will be forthcoming as an e-book from Dzanc. A long-in-progress nonfiction book about water is near completion. Three short plays are forthcoming, and a children’s book. McElroy received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and D.H. Lawrence Foundations, twice from Ingram Merrill and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Northwestern, CUNY, and other universities. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930, McElroy was educated at Williams College and Columbia University. Further information at www.josephmcelroy.com.

Sarah Gridley is an associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of three books of poetry: Weather Eye Open (University of California Press, 2005) Green is the Orator (University of California Press, 2010), and Loom (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013).

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Joseph McElroy
Plus

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