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.