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.