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.