He stood away from this thought. It came over him everywhere. Newer parts of him nudged each other’s outlines of light and sometimes joined. So he was not just increasing.
He could become less, when two skins of lumen inclined together and were one skin and then this filament between dissolved. He stood away from the great thought that he had thought. But it had settled over him and covered him. So he rid himself of it by letting it do what it would do. So it was falling as slowly as snow once had seemed to fall, lowering so slowly he took long to see that its slow movement was also a lifting. From below, a lifting up but not away.
He stood away, he thought, from this thought: the thought that he could think his own growth. But he found it all around, growth and thought, thought and growth, it opened and was close and he felt it was himself but felt it was less.
But still he stood away. He had to.
Sometime he had said the words sad and alone, but he did not know them and wondered if he could think them onto him but wondered where they were stored if he could recall.
He stood away from the thought that he could think his own growth.
How could he have choked on the dust those axes had ground? For he had nothing to choke with. No head and neck—for that was where choking choked. Blue in the face. Yet heads had eyes that saw. And he saw.
He saw the thought of his own growth risen and fallen, land and lift.
But he stood away from it. He tried to know it was there and done by him. But to stand or be away he found himself thinking again why choked. What did choke mean? He had nothing to choke with. Still there was what was choked on: for he saw that where his tucked frond tip thumbed and smelled the window, the window shifted and poured and dropped the sands it was made of, dropped them into blue morning space. Meanwhile, at the same time, so easily he thought what was the use, the slow-flaming gland that was a last centering sign of what had been the brain now bulbed its flux up over the dulled tints of the optic tracts and their crossing.
All of a sudden the gland’s force had flooded and slowed the wheeling Sunbraids of the midday cells. So Imp Plus found no point to this ease of the gland’s power. At the same time the wings or spoke-fronds had paused in their many forms, and one was now grown into and through what had been a main land and luminous reservoir of what had been the cerebrum: so this wing or neck at this moment of sluggish halt was a body of bridge pinning or belting a lower cross-lamina of substance illumined in turn by the two glancing tubes that entered the underhousing where the disc pump was. But the tubes’ streams brainward or for that matter plantward barely moved now, any more than the other reaches of flesh, pinions, outline, or fronds of him moved. And the dropping of the sands to clear the window glass joined the stubborn glimmering gland’s pointless force thickening impedance, and joined the gathering fixity of his unengaged new being’s range of differences to think as if for him; and he choked.
He knew choked but not what it meant, so he could not choke on the word, but he choked.
On an absence.
Though choked not on that old absence of obstacle which was how the impulses had once come on the frequency from Earth. Choked now on an absence that was obstacle.
Absence he didn’t want, which swelled him into glut.
What did?
While what he saw despite some need to stop using ultrasight was the reverse of swelling. It was shrinking he would incline to act on. For he was choking without knowing what choking was. But was disinclined, except to be.
So through all the milky smoke of the great thought fallen, risen, standing dispersed, the Sun’s flow made the only move. Or almost only: for, disinclined to act, Imp Plus yet inclined the other way, and when the Sun then grew less light Imp Plus knew this could not be the Sun itself, not the great hand withdrawing; for the glial cells and neurons—he knew neurons—and those other cells by some offsprung reversal like the neurons’ earlier selves unfiring but able to divide—had all been at their midday. For he had thought so. And since therefore the Sun had all the time from noontide yet to flow, the lessening light was due to Imp Plus not the Sun.
Imp Plus inclined to sleep. An early night was sliding across the slowed flood of Sun. Was what he choked on light that was forced to stand slower and slower?
For he choked. And what swelled, and swelled toward sleep, mixed him richer he felt and richer as the slowed and long-standing light enfolded and embraced him so he breathed its gas forever but stopped.
But stopped and stopped.
For he could not breathe; for what lung had he to breathe with?
But it did not take a lung to look, he thought: for, looking closer through the light that clearly he could not breathe, he saw the shrinking all over lean out of itself to swell like breath drawn in. That is, he swelled a bit but felt less choked. But then he was back where he began. Yet, having looked, seemed to breathe when he looked again out of his inclination to sleep; and in the great milky suspension which was the thought of his own growth, he saw parts larger than any the milky suspension had held when he’d first seen it occupy him like a shade. But the sizes were not all the same. He saw that the larger ones were made of smaller, and as he looked these smaller stopped avoiding one another and leaned suddenly together, split their flowing shells, and stuck and joined.
Elsewhere, remembering that looking made him breathe which meant he did not choke, braids of the Sun spindled their light; and particles of the milky smoke rebounded from each other without hitting; and larger particles—he knew blast—blasted back into smaller.
And Imp Plus swelled and inclined also to shrink and swell or shrink again, and crowds of off-blasted particles of particles slid back together, and the spindling Sun slowed.
Imp Plus saw that no, it was just because he could breathe that he could choke. But because he could choke he could sleep, which was—wasn’t it?—one more inclining among inclinings. But choke was sleep, sleep was night, night not see. Since see and look were both sight, hence in part the same, and look made him breathe, and he could not choke if he could not breathe—why he must look.
Which meant he must not sleep.
Though look was not see. And the big and small particles were undecided to gather or disperse.
Which were two inclinings among inclinings. Inclinings flooded by a slow-flaming gland that seemed like his sight unlimited.
And if joined like the microsight beyond the capsule into that length of blue afternoon space where somewhere some cloudy blue-mottled Ground hung like a preserved gland, then also connected to the sweet watering of some body’s eye feeding Imp Plus on the pulse of its color contracted across a pupil gap by rings of muscle celled like an Orbital Monitoring Station experiment able to change size.
Divided, Imp Plus in one dilated membrane heard the voice that said “Vanity” say “Glad I didn’t pack a bag.” He choked back something lost. And in another contracted membrane heard, with a pulse choke-bombing up and down his glorying head, a voice say, “But what would be the advantage of a capsule that could change size?” The same voice he also smelled saying (and so acrid that Imp Plus wanted to toss his head this way and that to get out of a chamber of chalk dust choking him), “The brain can signal lack of sugar but not lack of oxygen, so we’ll watch you for any accumulation of CO2.” The words were hard to wait for. He was choking even if he had no brain now but instead neck after neck unheaded and unlike a neck he had once prepared to save. Or had the operation at the last moment reversed the plan and saved the body not the brain?
He choked through the velvety waters of eyes whose enticing mesh was lost for good; he choked through the voice’s words Travel light. He choked through a last grind of disintegrating teeth meshed on an axis between axles—that was it. A grinding dividing of ill body by ill will: he saw it in the capsule window like the reticle they had left out—he saw
fade into the clear glass and recalled only the grinding dividing of ill body by ill will, geared through soft sand and hard road to outdistance the dune watcher gearing his overdrive: but away for what? to find all through the towering headaches of that last weekend body over will in constant mesh of want driving back to the Project called Travel Light only as it had become his own secret will over the body from which that willed secret was to be divided.
Back at the end of the weekend, then, to the secret field of growth, Imp Plus had choked as if he hadn’t meant to on those words accumulation of CO2. And now on the O that was all around him. And in him. But bonded into absence.
And now new-grown but standing away toward sleep, he knew only that he’d choke if he didn’t do one more thing. But then another. Many. That was it. Do them quick or else.
And in the midst of the great gland’s bomb that like his multi-microsight seemed boundless and therefore unengaged, he found it also not like his sight; for the gland could not have focus: if not in where it went at least a reverse focus in its source. For the gland sent its omnifluence out from the same old center of what had been but was not now the brain.
Yet more: this difference between gland and sight turned Imp Plus like breathing to and from the gland and its field of himself. Back or forth past the optic crossing. There discolor had now long turned nearby fibers palest olive. But been turned to pinwheels of radii so many he would not see with his sight for a moment that the wheels lacked rims and the radiant spokes of so many lengths extended many colors fixed for a passing moment upon the axle points of the pinwheels but then shot off like stalks pulled up or like long low animals with plates instead of membranes sliding into water, the waters of all the fields of flood.
Seeing that the strange words radii of color were true, he could not stop to know why.
For the difference he had found between great gland and multi-sight turned Imp Plus to a new difference. It was in the spindling Sunbraids of what had been the midday cells now midafternoon. What he saw in the slowed Sunbraids looked caused by the light of the milky standing smoke of his great thought but also making that blinding curdle and sponge of light as ultramicron particles give up the spring of their meshes and slick frameworks. How did he know ultramicrons? What he saw was that those reverse-magnet Sunbraids raying off out into the fields of his space were braids of two Suns not one.
And the new one was sun from him. His own.
Sun that was him.
He’d seen it in pieces and in waves longer than Ground’s but shorter than the long elbows and sailing legbones which were the great Sun’s rays, some greater some less, both greater than his own one kind.
Which they fit—and in a wonderful braid of angles that gave him for one last moment a darkening ratio of known body over known body and body under body under the eyes of the dune: so for that moment that he would know was his last and most enticing choke, he recalled her warm waves and his, free and loose together as if those bodies were not lost to him always.
Thereupon he knew what then he saw he had tried to know before. This thought took effect before he knew it, and the effect was a sourceless jolt that turned him like unfolding him nearside far, or like a thought that was his charge to learn. It ran through the thickening gel and blew the ultramicrons out with a crash the reverse of crash so they hung again dispersed in springy nets of mesh. And the Sunbraids and floods of Sun moved again, though Imp Plus was given pause by knowing what had caused the change of charge. For that was what it was, a change of charge.
And the cause was the jolt which was a thought.
The thought that not only could he think his own growth, he must.
Yet did not his changing limbs think him?
But the pause was a way of speaking, a dim sound of how someone once had spoken. Or how a thing had grown a name.
And now so much flowed from the new state, he could only think he must try to know what he knew. Silver lines—two—drew his thought; but not yet, for now he would think only about the Sun tubes. The tubes moved again, or what was along them. He was breathing.
The things in the tubes differed.
Knot-packets of double-Sun were not all that now raced down from his clear underhousing to the plant beds. What was not the packets was streams of another. Points within points that held each other off but did not defend against his reaming sight. Which came very close or not. Depending on what, he did not know. This lack of limit was not good. He went close, or brought the tubes to him, but did not know what was to be done with what he found.
For it made him think of himself. Of constant mesh gears on a seashore road. And he would not go back into that rich mixture that choked him into liking to be choked. But this time inclining toward the currents in the tubes, he would not think beyond them to what he had once thought was a thought he could handle. (He did not know handle.)
So for a time he saw only what he saw. Points of orbits within orbits. But one point or body of space repeated. And the unit was one smaller shell of orbits held—how?—between two slightly and equally larger shells of orbits to make a lot of empty space into a tight whole of spinning cross-orbits, in which the fastest of the bodies in the orbits stayed closer to the two larger shells than to the middle smaller shell yet so that all three bodies made one.
He followed both tubes at the same time. He liked this mere twofold motion more than the myriad radii his sight if he chose could bring to bear. For he thought of two eyes once and how their lines met always at a point you could see, like a line of chalk becoming an ellipse or bright pale teeth lighting the moist loin of mouth coming close to the focus of his mouth.
But he mustn’t think that way, he must see what was here: that the upward tube from the plant beds into his own being brought back only part of each body he’d seen flashing down the plantward tube: the outer parts or orbiting orbits, not the smaller shell of orbits in between: so the smaller stayed in the plant beds, and the larger came back: and if when the upward tube stopped flowing he choked, then the upward brought something to breathe: which did not mean that the slightly smaller in-between orbit left in the plant beds was not to breathe, though he did not know.
He had said ultramicrons. He had known.
From the Dim Echo now absorbed.
Or from what the Dim Echo had known from. From Earth once. Fences once—that was it—fences around ultramicrons, or of them. The ultramicrons were all the particles of his thought, his great thought from which by a slight change of charge from could to must he had now moved on, but which had dispersed suspended and at a point had gelled toward choking thickness till he had reversed the charge and reversed the feeling the particles had for one another: so instead now they held apart, and this dispersed suspension faded into his being—neither up nor down nor back—and was seen no more. But what did the word ultramicrons do?
Ultraviolet he knew from the Dim Echo, but the word was albedo, and he’d been briefed to recall it; albedo was being measured by Operation TL. But albedo was a cover. Camouflage, said the Good Voice. And ultraviolet was not only from the Dim Echo, it was from the Good Voice’s briefings, and it was from the Sun and they had said you could not see it or the D that, beyond Earth’s envelope, its angstroms might help to bring—angstroms were not langleys much less henrys—Imp Plus recalled remembering langleys by the dozen—and if the ultraviolet was from the braid-bright Sun, the D was not Dim, but if ultraviolet came like thought in ultramicrons, Imp Plus could see it and maybe had seen it.
Which Ground for all its monitoring would not know. But Ground was not monitoring now. Or if monitoring, not by Concentration Loop. Which Imp Plus had popped from one or more folds. Though which of the hanging slivers with their incoming waves rooted the Concentration Loop Imp Plus didn’t need to know.
But then, from the window he had touched without seeing out of, like a sheer dream of the changing neck or limb that touched it, he saw now back over the whole capsule. He saw what he had been becoming. He remembered not understanding time. He looked away again at the window that he did not want to look through. Then names for his parts came to him, and he looked back on himself where he saw still more time. For the crimson that flashed in brief veins that he had begun to see all over himself during the shifts of substance and that flashed in the warm of the day not much at night, he now saw in the darker reach of the bridge body that wound layers across one warp of what had been the brain. This sharp crimson flash reminded him he had not been seeing crimson flashes much now. And seeing this was so, Imp Plus though wending elsewhere to two silver lines he could not place found a moment of many crimson flashes everywhere over himself.
Which was the same, he now saw, as the spread feeling of his great thought of growth just before it became particles rising and falling in solution that from free coequal spread changed toward gel. He knew gel, just as he had thought he would be able to handle that great thought of growth. But as he saw the crimson flash equally over all of him equalling the thought that in fact he had not been seeing the crimson, he saw too that the one crimson that suddenly veined in the bridge end had been so sharp because it was in shadow—the shadow himself against the window that was between himself and Sun. But when he bent away removing the shadow and felt the cell nets of that warp dilate—which was what he felt was warmth—the crimson did not flash.
He looked more and at last he did not see, for the seeing membranes dilated. So he thought this close looking had made centers in each of them like the skewering electrode, and each center had dilated.
No: that is, he saw into the flesh of motion and elastic reticles of cells, and closer still: so a new, delimited aim aisled out, and he found himself falling as if he had been able to see the future by looking so close at the flesh of cell walls; and at that moment he found the fall as cramping in its plummet as the choking had richly been before, and he felt wrenched and yanked back on the end of an elastic sleeve or eye string he then would not look for.
And the pain reminded him.
But of what?
That he was in a bath of elastic. Elastic skin made for him. And the pain reminded him of cave-crash and himself—though him he was not sure of and would not seek.
He was reminded of the cave-crash, the stretching over an emptiness he did not know till he had passed it and had seen he’d brought it into being to fill it so he saw what he had not been able to do when he had stared his microsight so deep into his substance he reached past depth into potential. Saw what he had not been able to do. Saw because the enticing aisle offered to fall him into all final possibility. Saw also because parts here in this capsule, parts he needled his sight into, parts whose stuff was fired by braids of his and his Sun’s radiance, had peeled him from himself. Microsight had more power than he had known. It held him. The brown fingers with a gold ring peeled a sleeve back to put in a point. A syringe. But here in space he it was who had done the job, nobody else.
Which was to penetrate—he must (he saw he must) say what he’d done—peel and penetrate through microsight to such infinitesimal interiors of himself that he’d turned himself away from the whole thing he now was.
Had he wanted to see it so?
Looking, he did not know what to say. He had more than stretched and prodded the elastic skin the Project had designed to wrap him; he had turned it out of itself. The sheen he had now was not that skin that Project TL had fitted to him. That skin had melted into him.
Looking, he did not know what to say of the whole thing he saw he was, whose seeing he also was.
Where once there had been four wendings or faldoreams or shearows or morphogens, division had made many, and many one. What he had to see was that its only firm center was what went round it: the capsule sphere. This arc was joined to the plant-tube housing under what had once been the brain by two thickly silver-insulated wires running from an oblong box fixed at a place up the capsule bulkhead opposite the window beside which Imp Plus had now tried to station and confine his sight. What were wendings, faldoreams, shearows, morphogens?
Four kinds of his body and himself.
Words remembering other words, but new words for what he had become.
He watched his rims soften and rise all together to hold: but with nothing to hold, he thought: but as he thought this, the one great rim of substance humped into several oval holdings.
An amber-scaled shearow leapt up his being yet left its nether extension where it had come from; and he saw that this shearow, which had the drape-drop cover-lap edges and nightlike transparency of the faldoream it had once been, leapt across to the bulkhead to listen at the box where the heavy-wrapped wires came from. A control box.
But if wendings were now one, Imp Plus found by bounding a morphogen off either end of an axis visible in one part of the wending, that the wending had once been many and in some way still was. Many what? He felt he could not say, for see was the need or effect of say: many ports. But three, four, or many wendings had turned into their own motion.
He had to see his being only as it was now; for in the rise and fall of its glassy sheen of meat, making a wave of itself round or then across and back in every circuit, spiral, or skew of flowing interruption and many a skew he did not know until then in the fall or rise he knew he’d been prepared, he found himself full of what had been.
That is, where field had found a way to be a reach, or reach had found a way to know its difference from bulkhead, skin, or radiance it touched, and thus leaned its axis athwart itself to go sideways to join a reach so the reach was suddenly apt to burst and take and be its own neighbor plasm, he saw what a remembrance of caving burn and blood crack disinclined him to see.
He saw the previous leaning that had been present enough to grow into itself. And seeing this not distant past—the earlier tendings and extendings, the dark red or pale green ripples more gradient than motion, the turning of nets of micro-orbits of surface into silk films to see the Sun, yet cloudy silks to slow it—Imp Plus must incline away from the moment of those near memories; for they offered to slide him right down the axis of distance into all the shapes of Earth that could not be his now and would choke him in the words they threw up to him, shadows of what he saw and was and what he meant now instead to see and be, here in itself—that is, apart from Earth.
So limbs by inclination spread to others sideways and were not limbs. So such joined and thus disapparent bodies saw their way clear then to spread their membranes over across a body that had seemed to think itself equidistant from all the capsule. So more could seem less, in the reach of co-motion—only then to break its reply to the Sun’s radiation into all lengths of wave: so that along the membranes’ long reds, brief blues and violets, or medium greens but stranger also medium golds that were also everywhere, the one fastness of sight thus divided yielded all frequencies.
But frequencies of what, he was not sure.
A crimson vein came and went so fast it mapped a spiral and so fast the seeming spiral looked like two, and others in synchronous fields or seeming trains of ahead-thrown need approached what then seemed right to have approached. It was not growth so much as movement. Not a move so much as gradient inclination.
The shapes of the breathings round and round changed but continued, continued to change.
He did not add to himself as before.
Except to find that when a larger breath and a glutting web among many passing limbs crowded the arc of the capsule bulkhead to smell the acrid society of their thought, a contraction was always possible which was as much growth as were all those addings.
Which had gone with cave-crash and vein-flashes of crimson.
But now with more change than adding and more motion than change, the crimson continued in the bright heart of the late day which was many days, and, now Imp Plus came to think of it, the crimson died down at night when cold came, or Ground said it came. But what was cold?
A flank—the only flank and with new pores of moisture—the only flank for the moment (having been a wing, a neck, a finger of nose)—curled now about one plant bed assuming the oblong angles of the housing. And for that moment of brown shadow Imp Plus saw a shiver of coiling under the milky orange membrane and felt in his whole being the plant bed’s partial loss of Sun. But he felt it in the nesting curl of the shivering sweet smell of the coiling which was laughter he remembered up a spine he did not have.
And from the humor of this gland-warm, shade-chilled hug of a giant Micronesian clam fed unseeing by the hunger of light-hungry algae growing inside it, Imp Plus chose to recoil. But before he could do so, he saw the limb of himself not in the plastic housing which he was touching but in some substance below in the beds. What was it?
Yet the flank or limb slowed into orange-red like the optic crossing’s sometime glimmer, and the flank removed itself from around the clear housing so slowly Imp Plus found that this was what he had wanted.
To have the laugh at the giant clam fed by its own tongue of garden? Yet thus slide down the rains of distance not to Micronesian seas containing a blue-green recovery area, but to shearwater shores he could not reach.
He had another answer. The shiver of brown over the test beds. Shaded into chill by his flank. The shiver itself, yes, tested by the very slowness of his removal. Tested to see if the shiver of chill in these particular beds of algae had been really where he had thought.
The tubes between himself and the algae shone with action.
That must not stop.
Plantward in one tube ran two kinds from himself: first, the spinning units each one a small shell of micro-orbits held between two equally larger shells of micro-orbits; and second, the spindles—spindles spun of glancing knots radiating sun.
Sun he’d first thought glanced wildly because it was the great Sun caught in the tube track, then later because it was his own sun radiating force against its vegetable journey; but now Imp Plus saw the spindles were his own sun bombing the clear canal of plantward tube to rebraid with the lost joints of Sun quanta, and then he found that in the race plantward some spindle-radii did draw the other Sun into the tube track to rebraid, while some did this upon reaching the plants, and some others of the red and amber-gold spindle-radii of his myriad did not rebraid but, reaching the plant beds, hit the algae in a spray, shredding green and light from the damp plants into circles he had not seen till now and did not want to stop to dwell on.
Except to see that the red and amber-gold frequencies of this sun of his had been for a long time observable across the growing dispersion of the once-fiery gland’s once-central glow.
He did not care.
The thought came all of a sudden.
So much so that the motions of the wendings increased to a steady spiral as if speed changed kind. Then he did not care.
But the spiral oscillated. The thought of this colored its cause like a radius sweeping and fading, sweeping, fading, so that seeing himself whole he could say he was alone, and hence did not care for connections. Ground would say, “It looks like a starfish becoming a rainbow shoe, a featherless bird becoming a gland, a body becoming an orbit.” But Ground would not know what had happened.
The Acrid Voice had argued against video monitors inside the capsule.
Imp Plus did not care. They had wanted a life form to support, that they could afford to lose. A brain becoming information.
He and the silent Sun had folded to fool them, was that it? He did not care but could not rest. What he saw here had caused him pain.
Had cost him.
He let his sight multiply. So an amber-scaled shearow in its peninsular leap paused, or seemed to pause, in mid-reach and drooped long margins of blue tissue that returned to the more sluggish and productive faldoreams like neurons to their earlier selves, while morphogens bounding onto, but up from, the axes of the wendings touched shearow-leaps and faldoream-causeways to draw them among the wendings.
And the wendings in the solid of their spiral up and down yet as well under the full reach of multi-sight that Imp Plus relented into, gathered radiance of motion into a fixity like his own orbit: or, beyond his orbit, a possibility he wanted not to think of.
Wanted not to think of.
Was what he was. For Ground, for Project Travel Light, for the Good Voice.
Wanted, he had been. So then they would not have to think of him. Which led to a possibility he wanted not to think of.
Wanted not to think of.
But think or not, he had to see what now went on. Why had he to see, why attend? Words stalled into opposition, and his substance could have become morphogens freed from the axial plasm of the wendings, for he almost saw himself—itself a changing thought—wholly parted into all possible parts, divisor and dividend.
But only almost—or was that it?—for what had now been going on looked a power of “almost.”
For ultrapoints stood each other everywhere swirling but not meeting. Fields of points. Imp Plus knew field. Fields leaned together like planes of chances but the ultrapoints did not touch, they stood one another off though close. Imp Plus tried to know what they were points of. He said to himself they were in his mind. But when he once more confined the source of his sight to the ridge of optic membrane on a spine of shearow that he once more stationed beside the window, and the fields were even more thin and sheetlike than before with multi-sight but seen now to intersect each other, he knew he had been seeing these fields since long before the great thought’s suspended ultramicrons of milky smoke, and had thought these fields shadows of the light.
And shadows, now he thought about it, from those particles of his own sun that had not braided themselves with the great Sun.
And so they might yet be.
But seeing from out the wide length of his halted shearow’s membrane beam, he saw many of these fields coming from one surface source, high above which hung an expelled electrode-sliver adrift; and these fields of ultrapoints streamed forth thence in the form of a cone and it was volute because spiralled into an endlessly uncompleted funnel—till they broke off and flattened followed by others. But now Imp Plus saw the once-hidden wire that ran from the pump’s and plant tubes’ housing on the brain—or what had been the brain—across the cortex to this site-source of the funnel fields. And at this site on what had been the cortex, that sliver in the air above had once been stuck.
These fields of charge, then, came from the open wire that ran from the nutrient tubes’ brainward housing on the brain rim. And the wire’s charge came from the thickly insulated cables running to this underhouse across brief space from the box on the capsule bulkhead opposite the window. And now he knew the box. He had heard echoing in a giant shell of a place where the Good Voice had shown just where the IMP skin’s facets of narrow-panelled Sun-receptor cells fed into the capsule to this inside box. Bus, the voice had called it, having already said, “Go ahead, feel free to look around, it’s all yours.” And the giant room—the facility, the voice called it—echoing round the beached IMP capsule, had clamped shut the meshing waves of valve shell on Imp Plus, but on the Good Voice too maybe, so that Imp Plus wished to be alone with his desire.
Which led not where but how: or so he’d thought, not knowing he would think his own growth and be apart from Ground in chances more curious than he himself would foresee. For wait: that choking gel of the great thought that he could think his own growth had stopped not just the dual plant-tube streams but the disc-shaped pump inside the underhousing, and the pump had not begun again till after the welcome charge had run through the thickening gel and blown the ultramicrons or what else they were out to hang dissolving and dispersed in nets of springy work.
But wait: what had stopped the pump had stopped what ran the pump, and what ran the pump would be watts from solar cells in the great panels mounted outside with the albedo receptor and infrared camera.
He thought he wanted not to think about it. It brought back Ground that said, MAXIMUM POWER IN ACCUMULATOR. GLUCOSE UP. It brought back the Good Voice that had said—not “Vanity,” which had come later from the woman combed and beached, but—“You don’t want to go on forever.” It brought back Ground saying WHAT IS GOING ON UP THERE? and thinking Imp Plus had gone on too long. (Though how long? or how much too long?)
He was one thing.
For better or worse.
The Sunbraids pivoted along the outer stream-lines and routes of the wendings and across the transverse lip-swells of the faldoreams, their pores aglint with late mineral crusts of the great gland’s force itself seen everywhere both in this late crust and in the shapes of glow. And his own sun sprayed slow in banks of particles. He liked them slow. They had caused him pain. They must have.
And he loved the functions of sight and taste and thought and smell and chances desired and held in memory. Loved the morphogen-eruptions paired now at either end of many runglike axes—not along the wending-motions but along faldoreams which seemed thus to trim the draping fringes of their golden hides, and change their sluggishness into dark shearows one of which, with two morphogens bulbing up again and again in a flesh that turned opaque, reached down again to embrace now two connected plant-bed houses. And Imp Plus knew he could not even want to stop what he also knew might lead him to why he had stood away, turned away, from the great thought that he could think his own growth.
For the shade over the algae and anabaena beds chilled him to the bone, contracted the wendings, clouded the crusts of force that glinted from the pores of the faldoreams. But most—the spindle-radii of his own radiance raced through him toward the plantward tube as if against a thing so like them he’d not seen different motions. And the morphogen beats now snapped that growing shearow out of its embrace to test by contrast what the shade-chill had done; for Imp Plus saw that the plant-tube currents ran full tilt again, likewise the pump in the housing at what had been the brainward end.
So the pump slowed when the plant-works lost their Sun. But the particles of radiance not already bound with the great Sun into braids raced through Imp Plus to get to the plantward tube. But if the pump—pumping what?—got its power through the volt circuit from the solar cells, the only thing that could make that pump slow (or stop, as it had stopped when Imp Plus had choked) was a change in that power.
The loss of power had come with the loss of Sun when Imp Plus had shaded the plant beds. Only one thing connected the two losses: the race of unbraided radiance through all parts of him including the parts where lay sections of the bus cable from the solar arrays mounted outside.
The radiance was rays, was brightness, was his own sun. But in the radiation of its promise he did not know what it could be, this sun of his. A race of radiance, but an impeded race to the plantward tube.
From his angle at the window seeing inward he thought he saw transmission waves had stopped coming in to all the hanging slivers but one. Yet other slivers might remain. Shallow, deep. If deep, maybe now mobile through all streams and intersections of his work. Which he found hard to sense without the multi-sight he was trying not to use.
There seemed more, but it seemed slower. Racing for the underhousing to get into the plantward tube, the spindle-radiations of his own sun seemed impeded by a thing—a potion: until Imp Plus saw this was the old radiant force from the once-flaming gland which for the moment he did not find.
He found his microsight burned into action and found the gland’s flood all over again now pulsed of particles and meshed so fine that as he understood why his spindle-radii had such wading impedance to breathe their way through, and as he saw the flood’s charged and deviant lattices through which the radiant spindle-radii fought to pass, he barely understood in the opening of all the pain he had ever known which now burned whole in breath after breath that pulsed away his very name—barely understood—that the particles of the gland’s flood, though infinitesimal next to the spindle-radii, were in every other way and every place identical and the same.
This turn—this motion or mind—came in him not from a site-source like that of the funnel fields; it came all over him at once; so he felt equal to himself at the same time that he had nowhere else to turn.
And at this moment he was trapped in a multi-sight that felt the reverse of trapped because it was not stop but passage, though sieved through lattices and lattices inside and out. And he could not stand off the one lattice fixed like potion crystal that came at him.
Until he saw it was an Earthly fence.
Inside was one thing, outside another.
And the fence with a red high-voltage sign told him that here, in the capsule and his being, the silver insulation about the solar-power cable had not been strong enough against the lattices of his own field, his radii seeking use.
He was sieved back and forth through the fence but the pain went into his knowing he was the fence.
If potioned by the lattice, he became the lattice. Dissolved, reconstituted.
It was hard and he needed help, but he had had it.
He was hardening but not choking.
What had saved him from choking was that he must think his own growth. But in the last long while he had not grown. He had moved, reached, contracted, and held up. But he had not increased.
Yet chances to go further led to chances. A chill from the plant beds had told him he was a part of them. A child coughed in winter smoke. Strands loosened and tightened in the corner of eyes, turned red when warm and then resiliently resumed their x-ray breath. The blind news vendor said he could have been a vegetable. The Acrid Voice said something that was not bad. Imp Plus saw he himself was the Micronesian giant with algae inside—though why not brown from the Sun?—but while the big clam could open its shell with its adductor muscle he could not enlarge his capsule.
He was tired but warm. The words reminded him: but of almost nothing: then the spines of the shearows drew a ripple of morphogens down their length like a hand under a cover and Imp Plus saw that though lacking lips he had laughed.
There were more spindle-radii but not more of himself. The spindle-radii found themselves braiding equally with the streaming quanta radiating from the Sun’s early-evening hand.
He must take hold, vegetable, animal, or himself. In daylight he knew the algae, anabaena, and other plants worked with what came to them to work with, and something came back up the upward tube. At night the dark upon the plants should have chilled him but had not. And while the pump had slowed or stopped when the plants were dark, and when the pump had stopped he had choked, while when he choked the pump stopped—he did not choke at night. At night, glucose and other life signs were high. But the cable from the solar-power bus ran to the pump house—pump house?—the morphogens rippled down the slow faldoreams and then the wendings waved the living knobs of the morphogens—he was laughing—so, chill or not, the pump pumped at night by Sun power stored from the day. But Ground had said that at night electricity remained at maximum.
He must think to grow, but what now happened he must watch.
A sleeve of orbiting Sunbraids shrank around the silver-sheathed cable and became hard. The pump paused. The sleeve flew slowly off. The pump went on.
He had the power. So he could kill himself. Perhaps with help.
The wendings turned slower and a pale grid of vacancy made a move counter to the wendings. Some new returning center was gearing into him.
He felt himself everywhere latticed. To counter this he moved. But only sleeved the cable and saw the funnel fields of charge stop spraying from the open end of the wire that came from the pump housing into which the solar cable went.
And then the pump did not stop.
For though he did not know how, he now knew the power could come from him, which was why the solar batteries did not lose juice at night.
He found he had known already.
The sleeve let go, and the solar circuit took over, but the radiant particles had done that sleeving to show him what he half knew. He knew half.
But must know more. Must know what down in the plant beds reflected his limb when it lay touching the plant housing.
He had known ultramicron, and thought he had not known it from the Dim Echo or the Acrid Voice. The fiery fence was himself as he had been, and the project engineers had handled him with kid gloves for he was to be hooked up to their system and then spent. But he would use them too.
He had looked into an ingrown body of mouth upon grooves and arches of a tongue laid with velvet nipples of light-receptor cells: he saw he had been the point of the dune watcher’s long, unknowing gaze, for Imp Plus had looked into her mouth—her not him, but how to mouth the difference, for was there a difference between a her mouth and a him mouth?—and he had known he did not fear loss on an operating table the next week: had known that as his microsight came to him by division upon division, the unknown desire that had come to him on the beach in place of fear divided its long vacancy to yield the pain of caving, the knowledge that contained the pain, and a lasting division of body-brain by will, to yield what he was and would be.
But which will?
He must know more.
Electrical power sprayed in his substance again. It sprayed from the open line below the hanging sliver. He saw that his new being—for all its impurity and potion—was a lattice that could take these sprays of the great Sun with whom he was in league and conduct them hither and yon.
But he did not know why, then, a slow, slow shearow reached out and, in its hardening state unable to divide its aim into fingers, guided the sliver electrode down toward the open wire where it lay partway down what once would have been a left frontal slope of folds, had there now or then been anyone here to face away from the bulb-bun cerebellum and thus have a left and front. And Imp Plus knew that where the sliver was to be reimplanted was not only the site-source of the funnel fields in what had been the cortex of the brain; it was also the site of the Concentration Loop.