Which meant Imp Plus would be in touch with Ground again.
If Ground was still talking.
And if, more to the point, it was to the Concentration Loop that the live wire from the pump house extended the cable’s solar juice.
But aiming the sliver down at this site the shearow divided the descent. Divided it not so much by stages of adapting or distance or the nights of time he had lost among more and more glial cells, but divided it by simultaneous attentions all around.
So the descent took time. Like steps in orbital tests long ago. Tests? Specimen growth arrested periodically by chemicals so the growth could be studied.
Another shearow not so adept as the one engaged in reimplanting the electrode got caught up in a wending-motion and found its image now darker in the chlorella beds. Two morphogens slipped with the look of a kiss-suck from a slow-rolling faldoream whose ciliary fringes radiated messages around Imp Plus. And when the morphogens like muscles or spasms seeking muscles joined the shearow, they burrowed in to bulge out just when Imp Plus found the shearow’s pressure on the sliver crystallized into a grip: whose prongs were the morphogens prodding out of the plasm they’d just joined.
Which, like the slowness of the wendings over the reflections from the chlorella beds, made it all seem heavier. He was being kept, he thought, from seeing it all. Kept too by the very equalness of feeling whole; of thinking all over; not centered. He had stood away from the whole view of his new being. But now he would not. Yet to grip what he had, he must go on being more; and to hold what he had unfolded and had, he must know what it was he knew. A wave passed through him. Albedo. Salmonella. Ultramicron. Opti-chlorella. The kiss of breath. His attentions found no one source-site of the words, but his shearow with its bone-tight hold of morphogens pressed the sliver closer to where it had once been implanted in a fold that had dilated. He had had a head for figures, had known ultramicron, had felt the bright cells of his tongue nibbled by the mouth of a being who said, “Vanity”; and he had eaten olives with the Acrid Voice that transmitted the pits out of its mouth by making them vanish into the thumb end of a fist. Through days and nights of a synchronous orbit that kept to Earth as a circular hand keeps to a clockface dial fixed to it, Imp Plus had feared Earth; for he might lose breath as he had lost weight. Weightless he had grown more and more.
More weightless? More words came everywhere. Locus. Cada. Templadas. Yet came from the local faldoream dividing and dividing an endless space from the descending electrode to where the shearow aimed it.
Weightless, he had gained. As had the salmonella bacteria years ago that multiplied faster weightless.
But he had crowded the capsule all by himself and though the Acrid Voice had made more space by talking the Good Voice out of the added weight of an on-board video monitor, Imp Plus knew where he would gain weight: Earth would give him weight.
For if Earth had made him less, still if Earth had not subtracted him there would have been zero growth.
Subtracted him from himself. Divided him by himself. But chosen him because he chose himself.
The project had gone to him because he had gone to it. Known to known. To be its ultraradius describing unknown by knowns. Describing ellipses yielding Sun milk and spiral braids and seabirds reflecting shadows that flashed crimson darts in the warm day but flashed infrequently in the cold night which now came on again like pulses of division impeding the sliver’s descent.
Until the shearow must question this division: and with a glimpse of a fresh fan or delta spraying charge through him from the open wire (and not looking different from the charge set off by the chemical juice spurted between neurons), and like a life for whose support he told himself he didn’t need a capsule that could change size—the shearow then proceeded with the help of the now hard-clamped morphogens to pinch the sliver back into place in the charged surface.
For at that instant Imp Plus had seen elsewhere what the wending shearow’s reflection was reflection in. It was his find. His discovery.
Ground was saying words. Words heard before. A voice itself reached up into memory—overheard? transmitted? part each—AFFIRMATIVE IMP PLUS WHAT WOULD BE ADVANTAGE OF CAPSULE THAT COULD CHANGE SIZE, AND HELLO AGAIN IMP PLUS HAVE YOU BEEN THERE LONG TIME NO HEAR. THOUGHT YOU DESERTED US.
But what was his discovery?
Out of the shearow the morphogens stuck thumbs unopposable, stiff, and together, and these also cramped the shearow. Imp Plus felt a symmetroid stiffening in the shearow with the morphogen but also in that other shearow that was again above the plant beds, and in other darkening shapes. He reported oxygen and glucose gauge readings stable and no undue accumulations of CO2. Imp Plus thought he answered Ground without giving Ground his discovery.
The discovery was water.
He recalled saying water, seeing water drop so tensely bonded that though it flattened into discs it hit the Earth like bombs. But the discovery was more than what the reflection had been reflected in; it was a discovery of time: time elapsed, time possible. Time ahead in the solar wind from which there was no lee.
The wending shearow had found a length of its membrane glittering not in the plastic cover over the algae but in water.
Vanity, came a dissolved voice up out of salt water from an Earthly sea.
Not this water. This water was Imp Plus’s discovery. Water.
Water so deep he became mindful for the first time of how little there was of him now when it was too late to answer that open-mouthed voice, Vain animal.
Water deep too considering all the solid hours spent here in a season of space that Imp Plus recalled like an eclipse of Earth.
Requests how long ago for enzyme action in chlorella.
Requests which looked now like tests merely of alertness in the odd fish cast toward chance hunger. A time of shadows more than birds. Bodies more than body. Shifts so new there were not words to show them. So all he did was reply to the great Sun each day and reply in the nighttime work of the plant beds and the looks and nets of communal and independent lumens changing through darks that were changed in turn by the lumens.
But time possible. For Project TL had launched him with water enough only to give the plants a fighting chance to be explored by rays. Sun rays free of Earth’s choking film yet finely latticed by new giant molecules built specially for this IMP’s mineral window.
Rays also greater, heavy, and unknown.
But water. How much could there be after how much time?
The shearow restored the sliver and before it found its bed again the sliver was already speaking.
Asking and again asking Imp Plus to check oxygen. As if Ground had not its own telemetry. And asking Imp Plus as it had not for years almost, or days and days, for frequency and orbit.
But before Imp Plus could say SYNCHRONOUS or hear Ground say NEGATIVE IMP PLUS, SAY AGAIN, and before Imp Plus could recall the camouflage cover of an orbit quite other than synchronous, and before he could see at once that Ground suspected an alien monitor, Imp Plus saw that moments ago he had transmitted the routine glucose and oxygen readings even before the shearow and its bone-firm clamp had had the sliver implanted. The sliver had been poised above its bed away from the streaming fan of loose power that went out into a substance of himself which he had no name for as yet but which, as one who recalled ultramicrons and a fence with a red sign telling him he would die, he had come to think was lattice acting like the crystal in the solar cells mounted outside. The word was lattice, he had gotten it all over again and now so that it conducted him Earthward.
He wanted to be away from the fence. Yet it could do nothing to him, for he was already it.
He must see the water. He must get into it. He must be in the plants. See what the Sun had done there. He persisted in this. This thought. Which was that the Sun had saved him as he had planned.
His parts still gave the crimson signal but not frequently. But they did not increase in size. And they had composed into a state that did not look like movement; yet this might be because, no more than he could re-form the particles of that hypothalamus the Dim Echo had named, could Imp Plus want to withdraw from multi-sight; and in the simultaneity of multi-sight there seemed an element of motion that seemed in turn to hold the object of its focus still. But there was the motion in his parts. He knew that the hypothalamus now lost through his substance had been a set of controls: and was this set then in a course of dissolution, or was it finely spread? The motion in his parts was spiral whether he stared at the plant beds or not. And slower, as if his compound eye closed in on what it only partly knew it wanted. It was what his laboring microsight examined and it was itself that microsight. He recalled tired. It was not wanting to go on, and he had been this during some time before launch.
It was when he had thought himself that fence.
Or the fence he was to be.
For he had thought this too. Though then it was—he was—a lattice the Project personnel moved through. He had thought this because of the place between the larger and the smaller green rooms, the place where he lay down and let go his controls. To sleep with a voice not Acrid, not Good.
A voice saying what to do: during launch, orbital insertion, orbit. Impressing him with a grid of acts to echo not himself but the Project. But more a lattice with glittering nodes for each angle of intersection: a lattice that data went back and forth through.
So he let this happen and he turned to a thing parallel: the fence with the red high-voltage sign.
In this turn he did not see why he dwelt upon that fence for it told him he was dying. He did not know dying. But when the voice let him get up again, he felt a split. And now to Ground that saw no advantage in an enlargeable capsule he would not explain that even if after programming he was not exactly in clover, the secret split embraced him: it was the fence terrible in its promise: its promise to use him.
Two promises. One if he served as the fence. One if he did not. What could Ground know of such a fence? To Earth Imp Plus might as well be one of those old experiments with salmonella.
He stared into the plant waters. What came back was a desire for a part: desire compounding nothing but what had become of him—a segment of plasm turned as by an elbow bone; a section of plasm shadowed out of color but clear-skinned of scales he saw were cells grown to the surface; a strip of glow, a faldoream membrane sending mild light after the falling face of the Sun from which it had learned. Amid this composite a thirst for circles said that centers had returned. And then in with the fires running down the plantward tube from the housing, he saw potato shapes glisten and drop from the cups of algae no longer green in the blue-brown evenings which had fused outward with days in a field. And the field was him, grown to no scale but the alpha of the great Sun eclipsing the drag of all the magma underneath Earth’s Ground.
But if the scale was imponderable and tiring, the shape looked to be the same potato-shaped power plant he’d found in the cells of what had been his brain. The power plants called mitochondria staring through the saffron cytoplasm and platinum-sparked sheaths of glia and breathing each a path of particles through locks of light. And here now in the plants what looked to be the same potato shape. For had he and the Sun, then, brought the power plants of his own cells together with the power plants of the algae? Each potato shape with two membranes, the inner inwardly folded.
But the folds here varied from those in the brain’s mitochondria. These folds lay deep within the shadows of each alga, each fold like the gill of that Micronesian clam, slow folds some thickened into sac-discs stacked so that Imp Plus, staring through membranes and interior baths of sluggish-flowing tissue-cover, found not just the same charged bodies he’d seen rolling down one tube bound in shell orbits bound one smaller between two larger. He found then, deep within the lamina of the stacks, the bodies he then knew he had been looking to find. For they were the idea of green that he had thought to himself so long ago that he had almost the power to forget the name of these bodies which he saw now were really blue-black as if because the Sun had gone away. But the darkness down here was another light, not just the hand and face of the Sun at work in the evening communities of himself. For this darkness here deep within the potato-shaped chloroplasts, was a lumen of force as needed as all their daytime work. For through the semi-fluid which bathed the folds and their stacked discs, Imp Plus saw drop after drop globe out into the being of an independent pulse of flow and saw it was the same sugar he lived on and pumped through his system, and saw again amid one field of radiating particles that his desire had been to see this sweetness and more. And the more he was and saw was more than he had desired. For the potato shape lay also near shoes of yellow hide, and was also a drop that rose over a ridge and leaned along a hair and arced thousands of miles into a fire whose face—his own—gave light to another face wet with failure.
The potato shape of the algae’s chloroplast power plant was not the first potato shape glistening on a leaf and dropping into water. This potato shape that dropped was water. And this was what made the target drops into systemed rings mapping (as if to get back to) an inside with other potato shapes within the leaf’s chloroplast he had prepared to remember or had been prepared by a voice he’d heard to remember—the rings of each blue-black molecule that held the idea of green: rings concentered, though, as that molecule at the heart of the chloroplast was apparently not. For the molecule had a tail.
A gradient inclination. A want containing enwrapped within itself radii to come.
It was beautiful as the face that wept halfway between the automobile and the shoes of yellow hide beside the fire. But he’d said You are beautiful to the other face too—that had opened the sweet lids of its mouth to him and said, “Vanity,” and laughed.
Ground asked again for orbit and speed. Imp Plus saw that with the Sun and with the plants and with desires that divided him even from the memories designed to keep those desires at work, he had grown water. He had grown water to support the substance he had also grown.
But his sight held him, and so did the bone-knob morphogens fixed round the Concentration electrode. This electrode was fixed in the gray-amber anti-fold at the solar wire.
So he must see through whatever his sight joined and collabored.
Be drawn between the three sizes of body with all their infinitesimal orbiting point-bodies in the tail of the blue-black idea of green and what he found in the waters and in the airs above, through which the periodic drops rammed the water surface to fix craters there and centers becoming circumferences. And what he saw was what he had seen but not made clear to himself: namely, that, with Ground treating him now like some alien monitor, he wanted only to live on. But not name. Yet the fence on Earth would not go away. For he was the fence. And so he knew that two of the bodies in the blue-black tail rebonded in the plant beds to be water; and that the third body in the blue-black tail though changed from its look in the plantward tube had arms like valences of memory which told him it was the smaller middle shell of the unit flowing in such numbers plantward.
Which told him in turn that the large shell with its arms, and its electrons—they were electrons—was the same body that helped form the water.
But not the same as the now-amber Sunbraids flowing also plantward which after bursting into the plant house divided above and below the waters. And below blasted some of the bonds apart—apart, up, and out, lowering the surface of the water. But then (with another body not from the tail of the blue-black inner molecule but from its main ring-system) the Sunbraids increased both parts of the water bond immeasurably in volume and rebound them so as to make of the water a net increase.
And he knew through the recollected pain of the nets of charged fence that those Sunbraids that did so much had once come from Earth and had been of Earth even if not in their bonds of braid now.
But not giving Ground what it wanted, Imp Plus found his way back by way of the musing faldoream to the prior transmission. Step by step. Like steps in tests: deep unmanned tests to the asteroids, that was it. For what? A drogue of concentration jammed, thickened, and slowed him toward what he foresaw as solid with one and only one number of crests or crusted angles. Thus, he felt the risk of sleep in the faldoream’s musing words “Nuclear fishing.” So he told Ground Ground had been right that there would be no advantage in a capsule that could enlarge, for after all it was not as if this was one of the old Biosatellite experiments with salmonella that multiplied.
But when Ground replied that Imp Plus had not given the requested information, Imp Plus felt a further frequency in Ground’s transmission.
Like a pause for thought.
Imp Plus did not know pause. He could wonder what his limits were.
But then the transmission did go on and in all his being Imp Plus found symmetroid increase that was not the old growth.
This increase was result but cause of the words that came from Ground. They came in the known pulses. But they bore an unknown bond. But a bond he understood he must take the charge of, for then he remembered the bond and it was in his memory of the future, and the words carried a voice he knew: IMP PLUS REMEMBER TWO KINDS OF SALMONELLA NOT ONE. EVEN THE ONE THAT MULTIPLIED ALMOST THREE TIMES FASTER THAN THE OTHER DID NOT GO ON FOREVER IMP PLUS.
Ground stopped and went on, but there was a disturbance around the solar feed wire. Or rather there had been a disturbance and now was none: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS REPEAT PLEASE GIVE ORBITAL SPEED.
This second transmission seemed designed to do away with the first.
But the bond came back. And with a force it hadn’t had chance to have on Earth for it had been unknown by Imp Plus. But clear now: clear as aqueous humor in an Earthly eye that led in memory through sugar systems to microsight.
The bond had been drawn on a green blackboard by bone-white chalk. Drawn frequently. In numbers and words. And in an ellipse that talked. With two foci, one not there but one the Earth.
Drawn by a hand from which Imp Plus in the smoke of death had withdrawn dividing known illness by known desire until, instead of multiplying, the particles of illness seemed to dissolve in a resolution to proceed.
The bond was with the Acrid Voice.
The Acrid Voice had given him attention. Had briefed. Had smoked because it could not stop. Had talked smoke which drove Imp Plus out of his mind into a towering headache, then out of a green room into the Sun to a telephone. But the Acrid Voice had been talking from known point to known point without promises. Had stopped short of goodness. Not like the repeating Good Voice advancing into emptiness.
“You don’t want to go on forever,” the Acrid Voice knew how to say, and “What would be the advantage of a capsule that could change size?”
Maybe the Acrid Voice had known what Imp Plus had in his head. The Acrid Voice anchored itself to fact.
The bond had been there in fact. Imp Plus had known it.
But what bond now?
None but the interruption of the Acrid Voice by Ground to put Imp Plus again to the test whether it was he there or an alien monitor. No, the bonds were not there but here. With the Sun. With the power of braid. Bonds among himself.
But bonds he desired only to be—was that it?
Bonds he need only be. Albedo, said the faldoream among the turns of Imp Plus’s being; said softly or hoarsely through ciliary fringes slowly conversing into structures of saffron salts—Albedo, albedo.
And from one direction came the old choking, and Imp Plus said to himself that maybe nothing he thought to find here was a thing but was only recalled from the windy drogues of Earth: but this thought was not brisk enough to solve the choking coagulation—coagulation was the word to use. But it was Ground’s word. He was picking up some of Ground’s words which asked to be used. But for what?
But then in the choking and the converse chasm of not caring, the coagulation that like further processes had been slowing, stiffening, thickening, fixing him from function into a thing of crusted angles, gathered and carried the stalled presence of the Sunbraids into light that now opened the chloroplasts deep within the plants. Which Imp Plus saw so well he saw electrons and holes. In a rush. A promised migration that seemed to let him outside the IMP to see how the Sun hit the photovoltaic cells in the solar panels and drove electrons out of those cells into a circuit of power.
Which the Acrid Voice had not had to tell him. For Imp Plus had been somebody. That is, who had known ultramicrons.
Two faldoreams at right angles tried to shake with humor. The longitudinal drapings crystallized away from saffron toward a discolor like that of the long-dispersed optic chiasma.
But the night warmth came not from such fun. The warmth came upon this now almost wholly interior spiral so constant now that it did not come back because it did not go away.
It had to go somewhere: or go nowhere except the faldoream’s “Nuclear fishing.” He did not get away from fish. The osprey off the beach plummeted and was pulled under briefly by its prey. Imp Plus’s sight of the wendings speeded up or the wendings slowed down: so they were fixed past motion—and past color—functions thus then recalled into a new solid. Certain wendings—inside themselves at least—moved like circumferences one way; certain inner wendings diametrically narrower moved the other way. A string of morphogens, more than he’d known he had, inclined across two or three faldoreams (exactly two or three) grown close together, and the train of morphogen-knobs having joined inner to outer wendings winked red so slow the train spread into milder and milder light until Imp Plus wondering why it spread no more saw that it spread no more.
He thought that if, as before during the choke of gear-dust, thought coagulated without more thought, still then there could come the need for a coagulation other than failure. And what Earth thought Imp Plus knew was misguided. So was Earth to think itself the center for Imp Plus’s radius.
The Acrid Voice must have known what was in Imp Plus’s head. Imp Plus had meant to live. A capsule—even a polyhedron IMP with an unprecedented window—might be built to enlarge; but it must stop somewhere. Imp Plus had grown to cram the capsule, then had done other things. Contracted, regrouped, been turned into other motions. Electrical motion, too, though if to control the capsule’s orbit he did not know. Meanwhile the great Sun in its forms fished where it would. And Imp Plus braided with it his sun he had brought to multiply from Earth. But if these suns braided in part from Imp Plus’s desire remembered from those last weeks of Earthly determination, and if those braids streaming down the plantward tube constantly ruptured the water bond of a given volume of water in order then to multiply and multiply the elements of the bond and then rebond them to make a net increase of water, he knew only that it could happen: not that it would.
But did he want it to always happen? What would he do if it did? Drips of sweet flow edged up the upward tube. He did not need but did not find any sweet-eye now to float him through to the microsight he unquestionably had.
What was a life-support system?
And then he saw what a question was. And did so by seeing he hadn’t known before. And by finding these specimen questions.
A question was what an answer was to.
A shudder rippled the diametric thing or axle the morphogen-knobs became, and he thought that the triple units sharing the downward tube with the Sunbraids were carbon dioxide. Imp Plus saw that oxygen (likewise not alone) kept coming back up the tube from the plants even now at night during the dark cycle. He saw mingling with suns and other powers in the plant housing bodies, he’d also seen in the main ring-system of the blue-black bodies of green idea deep inside the algae’s latticed chloroplasts.
But to see these half-knowns was not to find a way through to himself. He held and was held: he was the things he saw: the laminas were equally one: the way was through a lattice letting him see that as the chloroplasts could be electrical semi-conductors like solar cells mounted outside beside the solar telescopes and albedo receptors, so had his own substance a semi-conductor’s lattices of migrant electrons and migrant holes; and, weightless, it all might grow purer as other semi-conductors had through a generation of orbital work.
A semi-conductor. This was what Imp Plus was.
But the way he found was not the sight; the way was through it.
To a fence so Earthly far away that this fence would not be seen through.
Until then he heard the Acrid Voice see through it.
And Imp Plus had the meaning of the two salmonellas then. In weightless space, the one multiplied three times as fast as the other; for the three-times one, unlike the other, had been irradiated: was that radiant?
Which took him back: took him and rocked him back: jabbed him with such retro burn that his orbit deteriorated: took him back, but back to what was not radiant but subjected to radiation.
But the faldoreamic murmurings had begun to string a net of harmony. Music to his membranes. So he tried hard to see the sense of what now shot at him grid after grid volted from the Earthly fence but no longer with the pulsing flash of red: and these grids told him weightlessness speeds changes induced by radiation yet may also slow some processes and so give irradiated cells a chance to cure their injuries or at least make vital the proliferations these cells would not escape.
But through the music of the faldoreams Imp Plus found the refrain of albedo, albedo like a gentle retro drag, not heard, only recalled. And in what he took to be the drift of himself, he knew that albedo was no more than Sun radiation come back from Earth, and that the potion dispersed all through him dawn after dawn from the now-dispersed flaming gland and from the rest of him, had also been poison.
And so it happened that Imp Plus, sloping into another clarity of pulsion, could stand where he had stood one dawn on Earth. Particles not seen punched jots of him from one place to the next. Particles cut through him. Cutting through to burn what would be cut away later. And burn what would not.
Burn his knowing the burning.
Burn through a winter in which what was happening to him was to most others unknown. Unknown to a wintry windy red-eyed news vendor, who said he could have been a vegetable. And to a child who licked snow off a hand and said Your skin is red. (Did the child mind?) And to a dark amiga who sang amiga. Whom he had tried to be known by before and failed, and who was beautiful. And to another far away but on the same point who was beautiful too and who jolted him by using the words Travel light so that he had now to try not to suspect her while he went on trying not to tell her his truth about Project Operation Travel Light and the blood that came into his face was camouflaged by that irritation the child had seen months before reddening week by week setting him apart.
Once when he’d had a leg to stand on, he had stood under a roof at the end of many nights, he had stood upon a crust of Earth; and nothing seemed to happen for a moment.
Magma did not uncrust itself. Voices did not strike at once.
But in that moment which, once behind him, was the prospect of agony, a reticle of radii breathed into him. Once in, let go. Rods of gamma radii logging his blood, invaginating the veins, thinning the skin, replacing him with a buzzing meant to choke with nets of probability an absence still possible.
At last now he stood again on that potioned point upon Earth’s circle. Yet now his radius self made Earth itself no more than one point along his own unknown circumference.
Which like some future map took him where he had not known he’d planned to be.
So all he knew was that what life he was possessed of inclined him to give Ground answers. In return for answers that in turn might make him know the more that he had come to be.
Imp Plus recalled the Contingency Camouflage plan designed to deceive an alien monitor. Imp Plus concentered his crystal on the pulses of a frequency agreed on Earth. Imp Plus transmitted to Ground the false frequency. And as, at last, he let the milky skin along the billowing shearow at the window see out the window, he transmitted to Ground what Ground’s plan called for, the false orbital speed.