Plus

Jolts—what—jolts—what—jolts cracked his skull out of his brain. Jolts drained the bone out of his shoe. Jolts tipped him elsewhere. He jumped or fell, he spun, he was in a spin of gyro-lobs slow fast.

There was an awful lack of pain. Where? He was touched by slivers jarred within their weightless sky, and their pulsings recalled commands from when he had been little more than the Dim Echo. Jolts ripped his sight through the window. He’d lost his tubes, was that it, this it? The shearow at the window was so dislodged it recalled leaps it no longer inclined to take and it was jolted back against the glass in time to see through it far away a dark dot in a cloudy break. But the far dot was a line, tiny, slow, jagged. It tumbled sideways, but how did something far away tumble? He did not see it for a second.

But no, he’d seen more than it; for he’d seen it far away on an arc-edge of a greater thing also far away: a cloudy thing, cloudy blue.

The jolts came over again. He shook on his pins and he did not stop spinning. The jolts would not stop. He had forgotten he had no skull. For his skull was trying to get out from inside his brain, and he had no brain now.

The cloudy blue thing fell into the window and then out. The dark dot he’d picked out became a jagged line again. So small he thought he might be only remembering and not seeing.

The jolt spun out the window. And he thought his skull in trying to get out from inside his brain broke a needle of bone through the dot that was a jagged line again now in the spinning window. But was as far away as a voice that had said the brain feels no pain.

He had no skull. He had no brain. He had left it in orbit. He was still in orbit, but around himself. But no parking orbit. Orbit jarring into orbit.

Ground was braking him. But into greater speed. Into lower and lower orbit. Ground was bringing him in.

The dot-line came by again. A mark on the greater cloudy blue thing. He had to blink, but the need trickled in toes he could not reach to scratch. Across the window of mist that he tried to blink against slid a molecular shift the equal and opposite reaction to which was the jagged dot’s transit out of sight again and with it the cloudy break through which it had been seen in the cloudy blue thing.

He was in launch all over again, was that it? Or on a spring end of someone’s thought launching him back in reverse launch. Sorry, too cramped to turn around, got to back up, burn one, burn two, don’t ask, don’t look behind you at what’s about to skewer you, just get into the right attitude.

The back-firings unhinged him; they did not hurt. If this was reverse launch he was in, it was not the idea he’d had of orbit decaying. The tumbling turned and when he found that the turning tumbled he saw clearly like speech to himself that the decay was hastened and multiplied by Ground.

And reverse launch without the housing. The housing over Imp Plus that had eased the suck of speed but had not kept his face from being dragged away.

The housing hit him like a thought, took him tangent as the buzzing slivers adrift had bumped off him aiming commands he could receive if he wanted to reimplant the slivers as he’d done the sliver for the Concentration Loop. Think of all he could do. The jolts jammed him back, and took him over himself over and over—but did they cause the rolling tumble of spin? The jolts had been set off by his own words giving the Contingency Camouflage formula. And in turn by chance the jolts had caused the housing to hit him and the slivers which he and no one else had sprung adrift in the first place. He had given the Camouflage formula but not with the attitude Ground thought.

He could see Ground’s viewpoint, but others also. He saw one shearow aligned now with the long weight of a faldoream. Ground’s viewpoint was that it did not want a take-over. Of IMP or of IMP’s work or the data. Hence the dual plan for Contingency Camouflage. But here now it was not dual: he did not jolt or tumble Ground (did he?)—Ground jolted him.

Dual was control. Control was being taken from him. Did he recall dual control because he was a machine? The crimson flash was not frequent now and it flashed beneath crystal laminations that made it retreat like inhaling. But if control was dual, wait. He thought of what was out the window, thought of it fixed: then thought of his own chain of morphogen-knobs, a diameter without question but centerless and bounded not by circumference or perimeter, but by a dimensional breath that was more than spiral wending and less and less and less like respiration.

But then he thought this because dual (he saw) only went with “control.” Dual was two.

He looked along two like ends of what he took for a shearow inclined sideways into a faldoream. But they twisted and twined here and camouflaged their differences: for this faldoream and this shearow were independently of him merging the one’s draping weight and the other’s bounding reach into a line, into alignment, a second diameter across Imp Plus’s growing fixity of substance—and across also the spine of morphogen-knobs: and he thought he could not tell faldoream from shearow now any more than either end of each pair of ends of length which across the hardening skin were fibers as pale as the lines the Acrid Voice had drawn on a slate wall, fibers tensed by sheaths of arrayed salts yet tensile in their give and bend with the jolts which now turned Imp Plus back: turned him to the shadows Ground had once read in Imp Plus’s thought untransmitted: for somewhere he knew that Ground had followed its own query WHAT SHADOWS, IMP PLUS? with the command CHECK DUAL ATTITUDE STABILIZER.

Given words were at all points of himself but so fixed in statement that he thought of the Dim Echo: and of words given not in the small or the large green room but between the two, in sleep, a statement learned: “Spin-stabilizer rocket orients spin axis at right angles to plane of Sun’s apparent path.”

So maybe Imp Plus could do a thing or two to halt or unspin the jump and tumble of this reefless shipwreck—if he could just remember where his own on-board attitude stabilizer worked.

His own: for it was one experimental operation that like the Concentration Loop or exchanging CO₂ for oxygen and glucose used Imp Plus himself. Manual backing up automatic. Back-up. Manual. He thought he laughed with a ripple of cartilage along the morphogen-axle. Manual O Manual. OM₂.

Manual tried to grip: he heard knuckles snap far away across a four-dimensional grid of laughter. Laughter not only his, but when he thought whose else, he saw ahead sand and heat and more sand that refracted parts of what he once had been.

And then two things happened. First—if it was first—this utter throw of spin and kick and jam and tumble of gyrate torque came round to what proved this skid through broken orbits to have been not whole: for what he now was in was an equilibrium: unique equilibrium refracted through his more and more rigorous form—equilibrium which gave to that forgotten, stiffly billowing shearow watching through the window—yet gave to all of him—a firm glance at the cloudy mottled bluish thing far off with its jagged dot seen like a thrust through a break in the cloudiness of the lopsided hemisphere which (having so termed the cloudy mottled thing) he saw it was—so seeing it he named it what it was: the gibbous Earth.

But second, he saw that, now calmly orbiting, the IMP had now stopped. That is, spinning.

Which stop he announced to Ground yet saw then what this seeing meant: that that prior equilibrium yielding a view of gibbous Earth and a still stranger completion of what had proved suddenly partial in the wild jam and throw spinning and kicking him down out of his bright shell of synchronous orbit, had been nothing like the true halt the IMP had now reached at a velocity not only greater than the former 1.9 of synchronous orbit 22,300 miles from Earth but greater than the 2.4 he had given Ground in case of eavesdroppers, never thinking Ground would act to make not just the camouflage at once come true but velocities still greater which threatened him with Earth and brought on new cycles of dark and light that divided and divided times until Ground came and went like a pulse of pulses.

He could not think. Or, not as he would. For Ground asked what spin Imp Plus meant, and asked Frequency check complete with Operation call letters all over again.

Imp Plus found the firmness to think as he would. To think of that first equilibrium: it continued: it had seemed a counter-turn inside Imp Plus recalling the current that cascaded a tissue of spindles along an upstream middle, though when the tumble stopped, the equilibrium held; so he would have thought it to be disengaged from the rest or circuit or lattice of himself had not this poise been also lattice. And also not separate from the bed, banks, bones, field, and hardening lights it had seemed to be disengaged and disinclined from.

But the bones and Ground would not let him think as he would about this beautiful gyro-norm he had made himself amid the former jolting spins. But now he saw that that was what the diametrical morphogen-axle and the salt-sheathed faldo-shear spine were: they were bone.

Did he wish a return of the jolting to set wheeling these bone-lines that intersected but at no center for he had none? Such spin would show again how free from it all his new-found equilibrium was. Yet if by being in the equilibrium he could then have left the spin to kick itself down stairwell after stairwell of burst orbits, still the spin unquestionably had stopped; and Ground’s queries like shadow went round this unknown while they went round also what Imp Plus saw for himself: that contrary to what the Good Voice had said attitude stabilizer had not been under dual control.

But he said to Ground now neither that attitude had been under dual control—nor that it had not. He tried to think as he would. He tried to contemplate the poised moments of force compounding the interior equilibrium—that interior and multiplied division of spirals that also stood still in their own no less breathing braids. Yet try as he would, he no more lost Ground than he could unbind the calcium and phosphate salts from the protein fibers they made bone, nor than unbind these two settling bones of his from the differences between their ends. He had to begin in his own way but knew what would be, and partly because the beginning was not now but long before.

IMP PLUS TO CAP COM. NERVE FIBERS INCLINED TO ORIENT BY CONVERGING ON CENTERS OF GROWTH THAT ARE ACTIVE. VISION HARDENING TOWARD MILKY AND TOWARD BONE, CAP COM, BUT A WHILE AGO GIBBOUS EARTH WAS VISIBLE THROUGH WINDOW BY MEANS OF SHEAROW MEMBRANE. ALSO SEVERAL ELECTRODES ADRIFT ARE VISIBLE AS IS BRAIN HOUSING ADRIFT.

He had timed this transmission to end as one of the new dark cycles enveloped the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. But tremors answering from Earth bent round the rushing waves of dark and he would have it his way after all and he would think as he would whatever he had his way.

He missed the Sun. He saw sand. He saw reflectors dug in holding the Sun among the sands—dividing and multiplying the Sun. He saw Ground divided.

He wouldn’t really see himself reaching Ground but he could see himself dividing Ground. He had a force he had not had and did not know; but he did not have the give that he had had. He’d felt this during light as well as dark. He had, he saw, passed through many darks lately—the briefer darks of his lower orbit. But then through these more frequent darks he had felt alien pulses go in the slivers that were adrift. The slivers hung like flameless candles, length illumined by Imp Plus—by star-pocked polyp-scales that all across his sight membranes in curls and subsiding spikes jelled toward horn.

Yet how then—while he would seem not to know each time just how long Ground could go on receiving and answering him before a new dark came between—how had he timed his transmission to end at that point? He’d timed more than one, he now saw, or was seen. Was seen.

Was seen by the crimson glimmerings he’d described to Ground; was seen—or not seen—by the glial and neuronal cells no longer regressing to glioblast and neuroblast in order then to multiply to more and yet more glia and neurons; was seen by now-homogenized fragments of what he could only describe to Ground as a once-central, once-flaming gland; was seen—or at any rate held—among other, slowing elements by the ambering Sunbraids that moved no less fast than before among his substance: his substance that itself no longer shifted except to breathe spiral waves round its lopsided limits. And these seemed as easy to describe to Ground as their wending origins were hard—and harder still the gathering into their functions of the faldoream languor, the thought of leaping shearow, the morphogen prods’ lasting inclination.

But the two bones! What did they do in their loose, lopsided X-shape, and where did they go? They had differing ends.

Whatever the IMP’s attitude with respect to Sun and Earth, two of Imp Plus’s crossed bone-ends lay away from the one window, and two lay toward it.

Inside the hot and hotter capsule, he saw the window had been altered. One clearness had supplanted another, which had slid away like rain.

He tried to tell Ground a number (yes, a number) of things. What was yes? He felt ahead of him without finding its words a thing above all other descriptions that he must tell Ground. But Ground made no response to wending or morphogen, faldoream or shearow, water level or once-flaming gland—though the crimson flashings, Ground said, might be mere memory or trace particles from space. Ground asked so often for orbital speed and call letters: until, through these words with nervous Earth that were more empty than silence, Imp Plus saw—and crimson flashed as he saw—that alien or blind as Ground must think him, Ground must at last ask, What growth, Imp Plus, what growth?

Crooked question, divided question, for Ground guessed that the transmission from Imp Plus was an alien monitor’s. But over growth the division of view would be greater still. Yet just as Imp Plus would think as he would, so too he would make divided Ground see him.

And now, monitoring this outgrowth of what Earth’s central nervous system called fine movement, the crimson came forth doubly aligned along both bones as far as their crossing point. But from that crux, it so leapt on alone that it bisected the remaining space between the windowward lengths of morpho-spine and of whorled faldo-shear. And he knew it would tell him what he did not know he knew—but this he had not quite retrieved. For what the crimson line—twine—skein—glowed—melted into sight (or was it being?), went on he could not tell how long; for besides having already winked red where morphogen-knobs joined inner to outer wendings, it lasted, in his tingling touch of it, beyond whatever bodied insight he had of it at the moment when the crimson flash became now first fork and then a joined line and twine and coil that, on closer look, constantly unstranded and stranded and was pieces and gaps of itself, in which if there had been a point in doing so, Imp Plus could have sighted limitless disjoining.

Yet taking no microsight, he saw some end. It was so magnified he knew again how small he was. Even how small he was long ago under a high, huge roof. Its inside had been ridged and crusted with tracks and levels and hooks. A roof whose floor was underfoot. While looking at the IMP his cylinder—hardly a “Platform”—he heard the Good Voice announce to him its precise height and heard a voice answer that that precise height was roughly (as was the voice) his own.

But what end, or end of what, was magnified? And what made him imagine he remembered what the crimson was? And like the strange timing of his momentous transmission not long ago, he thought himself from one end of it to the other by way of what its strandings, unstrandings, loosenings, tightenings, coilings, uncoilings, recoilings lighted up—and by his origin and what was in back of it.

An end of what? Suddenly now an unforeseen end: of thinking he had not made an error in giving himself away to the Project. For what if he had held back and then recovered and had grown whole again: or at most propelled himself around without a skin or brain: or, legless, lived on his fingers: or advanced through normal Earthly life headless, as if bearing a black hole in last night: or like a figure he’d seen somewhere with a hole through his middle bevelled like upholstery round the edges so it seemed the absence of a cushion. But if on Earth he had recovered from irradiation instead of now waiting in the brain of Ground for a recovery area, he would not have grown.

Ground did not answer his data. Ground must think what it would. About how he lived here, what he did for water and food. Ground could be now as silent as the dissolving dark had once been. Ground must think what it could about what Sun did to water and to brains. But was Ground mad? Had Ground been reconstituted? Imp Plus did not know mad; but Imp Plus had thought it when at some time past Ground had said, what Imp Plus had known Ground would say, though now Imp Plus rarely heard direct message words: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, WHAT IS LICKING? WHAT IS LICKING? OR IS IT LICK OR LICKS? WE DO NOT READ.

He had told Ground (how long ago) that the flaming gland had dispersed, been licked up and absorbed, and that so had the hypothalamus—what he’d thought to be that—with its many controls—or were they forces—of pain and pleasure, cold and hot, appetite.

But lack of response from Ground was not why he didn’t now tell what the crimson strand’s loosening and tightening illuminated. The reason why held him between itself: so it was some likeness between seeing and himself. For in the radiance breathing from the crimson strand’s loosening and unstranding, or breathing then in the loosened, half-melted strand’s self-clutching return to its tight spiral coil, he found the great lattice colonies now unmoved, and he saw he had let his own spiralling deceive him. For the colonies were a fixed mass, a high block of lattice bleached blue and green, a coral as pale as the odd force of discolor long ago noted in the optic chiasma now dispersed along with flaming gland and hypothalamus, and all else, into this fixity. This fixity was layered with the folds of conical wendings, folds of elongated morphogen-nodes and of faldoream-ridges, folds of shearow. For all these four kinds were now a hard translucent record of their former life; they were not moving now; not moving even where they wove round the upper cables and also round those lower tubes in which there was still seed motion, tubes he had feared for in his muscles when Ground had sent the jolts.

The ambering Sunbraids were everywhere in his fixed cells; and through these motions he could feel that the cells were holes held in a lattice, and were the lattice too; but they were also locus timers for tides of Sunbraid which were now harder to see although he felt no less timed or clear. The lattice was a field of times. He was as much the motion as its place. And the crimson process radiating (in his mind?) out from the two crossed lengths of bone which whorled hardness outward like light, illuminated the great lattice by driving the Sunbraids through the holes and beyond to the edges of himself where the equilibrium he must make Ground understand whirled its gyro-norm of seeming substance; but this was only part of the cycle, for then either the Sunbraids were sucked back by the crimson process tightening and restranding itself or they were themselves the cause of this helical recoiling.

Yet also both. Both. The word repeated, for he knew that he must hold on to whatever shot back and forth through a long ellipse of new pain—in order to see what this was inside the pain. Must hold on to. Or be held. Must hold on against new noise. Message pulses from Ground. Hold or he’d lose it. Lose what? Yet he did not have it: or he did: he had it to lose. Or had always had—even before radiation poisoning on Earth had had it: and now in the quantum moment at which he saw the secret mass of understanding, or rather saw he was the secret understanding, between the Sunbraids and the resilient strand, another thing happened: the wending-spirals round his edges were fading into fixity, fixed lattice, and he saw that their circuit had been fed by this bellows action between Sunbraids and crimson strand, which he now in the absence of that wending life could see shot back and forth and always had: and he saw on Earth a new jagged dot but a dot of particles that enlarged to his sight as if the old messy task of dissolving bodies into particles to transmit them elsewhere and reconstitute them had been solved: but the dot enlarged only to a formed, forced, milk of particles, and this was the Acrid Voice Imp Plus had brought into being. Ground had permitted the Acrid Voice to speak to him again and to ask questions and swap data, for Imp Plus if he was to be still more must know the more that he had become. And in answer to the Acrid Voice’s transmissions on glucose, water, growth, and the radiant seeds that Imp Plus saw he’d struggled to keep moving in their lattice-hungry cascades—he wished to tell the Acrid Voice that what he had was foresight, yes, foresight: and he had seen his own.

For here in this lattice whose three-dimensional field was exactly as regular as Imp Plus now saw (like more dimension) that it also lacked boundary—here in this lattice that seemed impure only in motion visited upon it—the motion was no longer the life of animal or vegetative or some wendo-zoan grip moving: but was instead the lights whose pieces were broken conversely back into streams of flow and bent and conducted into spirals of spirals by this lattice of himself.

He was now his thought. Spinal motion of Sun and cells gripped like a sheathing jolt a length of lattice, then was elsewhere like a star of spines still one spine moving like a scope beam.

But the exchange with Ground that he had foreseen and forced into being began now at the precise instant he came into possession of what he then knew he had also foreseen but could not say.

For the IMP now lunged free of its new road and fell off again into lobs of spin.

His thought turned upon wonderful words that pulsed and passed between him and the Acrid Voice on a Pacific island.

But what was it that had kicked the burners on and shut down the attitude stabilizer? Imp Plus had to ask the question. For whatever Cap Com had done to stretch IMP’s perigee lower then lower toward some recovery space contained in Cap Com’s uneasy brain, Imp Plus felt he was the one who had done it, and had done it through the semi-conductor he’d found all over again he was.

He saw the chalked ellipse, the Earth one focus, the other empty but there, the Acrid particles fingering a green blackboard.

And then the particles of the Acrid Voice came together and Imp Plus saw the Acrid Voice as if it were his own particles. And the Acrid Voice said: WHAT GROWTH IMP PLUS, WHAT GROWTH?

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