Joseph McElroy - Plus

The discs and eggs were just green till Imp Plus looked at the still more small packs of light flown in to hit the discs and eggs, and then the discs and eggs were also as orange as the inner flesh of raw carrot slice and as yellow as what he did not recall but at once all green, and he could see the orange and yellow or not see it.

Which Imp Plus thought was a thing he could do.

He called back the sweet odor of the eyes and with it the map of nerve light. But he knew that whatever he could do, he could never do what had been done.

Here, that is.

That is, to fit into one of his folds not only the beds of green chlorella and blue-green anabaena algae, but as well what could be seen deep through the slick ball of membrane that had made the darkness part before it. For what could be seen far down through the great membrane past bends that Imp Plus could never have seen around with eyes yet saw around by some bending force that drew him to what he knew he would want, was a slowly waving matter of layers. There were six — and pale bonds like wires that had been softened into fibers came down from the wall of the path to join the layers. But through these six layers Imp Plus found his vision divided like a substance that needed holes to pass through a block; and way below the six layers, a radiance went like distance, and most near its spread were packed fibers arched radiating — sweeping then toward a far place where memory promised maps of bark and maps of space that were all one map of motion — a place, though, that memory said was too far for him to want or be.

Below that a yellow area spread with a power he saw had once flowed across his car. Think of what this one fold held, then; think how far he had come. But he could not breathe. He was drawn where he did not know how to think to breathe. He wanted to be severed from here; and wondering if he could be, he found again the bad thing whose word he did not recall except as a question and now he found he did not know question .

He saw divided light back along the path. He had come from his fold into a path that went many ways. Up there the cave got big, and the walls and overhead were cut into like a step. Downward — or, at least, the other way — toward the six layers, there was less light. But he now saw the overhead and walls pulsing to press the long cave outward to make its space more.

This pulsing came from what was not the walls and the overhead, but on them: glossy, taut fibers. These were what at the end down by the six layers reached off the shoulders of the long cave to plug into the layers, for Imp Plus was looking both directions. He traced the fibers downward to the layers that were blinking into the points where the fibers arrived.

But Imp Plus was reacting, he was wanting to be not here: for something would happen to him that must not, but the word would not come with its question which might not help anyhow, and the fibers pulsed inward as if they too, though plugged below to the layers, wanted to get out.

Out of what? His fold? Out of what was body and, like the darkness that got thrust off by the grand, glistening membrane, was his?

Was body; was his; but not his body, yet seen by sight that seemed the cells seeing themselves, which took him back where he would not go, the body of smaller and smaller pieces thinking themselves.

He could not yet go beyond those layers below to the radiant areas arching away into red and violet double distance. But he could be in many places, and he knew this better than he knew the red and violet down there with their alien promise of green if Imp Plus looked away fast and then back at them. Yet he found a wonderful blind spot. It was in his new chance to be more than one place at once. Lower along this optic tract an intersection led to the layers; he saw (then saw no more except to recall) not one body but two of layers down there. They were tied point for point like a charted code to fibers coming down the tract. He had to go back somewhere and draw this map so others could follow it. The brief sight of it was like a blink with a different eye, if Imp Plus had had eyes, and from this sight he saw that while he could be and see two or more places at once, he might get a blind spot if he contemplated two separate places that happened to be just the same.

But no, when he looked back upward now from this crossing which he now saw was colorless unlike the pale olive fibers, he saw two tracts not one. The tracts were the same, with a bright hole at the end of each and beyond the hole colors of the Sun that filled the glistening green and blue-green of the algae beds; and these were visible at a distance other than the close range at which Imp Plus had maintained the chlorella and anabaena right here in this one of many folds, though not at this point of crossing whose discoloration had made him see that the rest of the fibers were palest olive.

The fold was his. The wound fibers lined this reach of it, or tract that the fold led out into. Or the fibers clung to the sides and the overhead. Yet from the crossing upward were two tracts of fibers. With a hole at the end, and each tract had been cut before the hole. The fibers pulsed. The cave did not get bigger. The shadows of tucks appeared, and some part of the fibers was prodding through at right angles to the cave or tract wall: some part of the fiber substance moved away in spurts or sprouts.

The fibers breathed or pulsed: they fidgeted like animals asleep; but the fibers worked; but sideways through points along their length, like the overhead sprinklers in the green room on Earth. And Imp Plus did not want to be here, and he smelled the odor of sweet eyes and followed the smell of aqueous humor to where the fibers had been cut just at the entrance or exit through the hole, or two holes from two tracts. But the odor of the eyes increased what he felt, this thing the word for which was a question but he had lost the question but he knew the word now and it did not help except to make him move against the packed, breathing fibers, each a bundle of fibers, and get where their sideways tendrils inclined toward being.

A block of light blasted him. It gulped around him closing him. It made him a new nerve past breathing.

But the neurobody that had blasted him was not just outside him. He was banging and bursting into himself; the word was pain , and the question whatever it was was lost like that tree — a tree elsewhere — whose absence encouraged moss to grow on it. A pain that twisted the blood, twisted it around the sugar if that was what gave the flow a sweetness like what had been folded in the chambers of her eyes, for that aqueous humor his memory had smelled the forms of with a magnified attention never possible on Earth was so like the smell of fluid somewhere near here he could almost himself have made the fluid out of desire. Which was not the pain. It was a pain that was terrible. He knew terrible . It was a word. The neuroblast about him had made him one, and it swelled and split. But the division had come from his want. And the discovery of this turned out to be a division itself. Neuroblasts happened but they were also things, and came out of distances and skipped along cells and stopped or did not stop. And then he knew something else in the pain of moving at so many points: he thought this was sticky, sloppy thought: and the Dim Voice spoke so close that the Dim Voice was in Imp Plus, saying, “Severed optic nerve inoperative has receded into wall of optic tract.”

But a word from Ground was too dim to jam out the shore. There were the shearwaters, an empty-mouthed osprey about to dive, and the eyes of her who had touched him with laughter on his blind side and turned him and had spoken and placed an open-eyed tongue between words she said dividing them — between “Glad I didn’t pack a bag” and then subsequently so low and mild that a seabird’s cry and the osprey’s sharp dive contained her words, “Travel light.” And he had knelt, knelt was like an elbow, knelt below her eyes and mouth, distant from them. And had done a thing which he could now get pain to forget for him.