Joseph McElroy - Plus

Ground was saying, GLUCOSE IN ERROR. IMP PLUS ARE YOU GETTING STRESS? The steady voice was a parent.

Imp Plus desired the Dim Echo not to answer.

Imp Plus had to do something.

Imp Plus looked.

COME IN IMP PLUS.

Two slivers had strayed within range. But what was his range? Imp Plus had not seen them come. They drifted. He could see through them. Each was crystal and silver. He did not know the slivers.

COME IN IMP PLUS.

Imp Plus looked beyond the strange slivers, looked for the shore, found it grain by grain hacked into moist facets by an ax of flesh. Grain upon grain visited salt by salt by waves of foam. He saw fingers in the water but then his own chlorella which the Acrid Voice had said was only seaweed. Imp Plus looked for the seashore and saw four long fingers softened by water, saw teethlike digits he knew were toes paddling by the fingers that were bigger in the water. And the underwater fingers went for the toes, which were also swelled by the water. But the toes moved on beyond the fingers and beyond what grew back from the fingers that were hers and what grew still further back deeper in the shallows of the sea. But he found not her but a sunny plasm as if about to dissolve. Undivided she was, but a blur of green and blue, orange and yellow and gold plasm, less there than his own chlorella beds were here winking under his eyeless sight here in orbit.

The beds had their golden glimmer too and a figure embedded in the glimmer. He had not seen the figure before. His pain was free to turn this way or that way. At a distance from the two slivers, a large, clear, tilted shell was adrift near the shadows on the bulkhead as if it had once been fastened. He knew what the shell was. It was a hemisphere.

Imp Plus looked for the seashore and her fingers, and the rest of her idling under water. He did not see the sunny plasm now. He saw the breathing algae and the clear, oblong cover fitted over them which reflected a golden thing he must face.

Lips of ridges, folds like flesh overflowing an armpit.

The whole curve of his limit.

But then more.

He saw this whole thing all around; that is, he saw it from several sides. And if he did not yet understand how he saw it from many sides, he knew that this thing he’d first seen reflected in the plastic housing over the algae was the fraction that was himself.

A motion hummed a wave through him. It was pain but not the caving. It was a pain that did not burn or break; it was a different pain, alien though once known. Toes under the water rubbed her in a place that was as soft as her skin was strong. Her head at his feet rolled back and the wet face did not speak, and the long mouth that had said, “Travel light” looked strained by its back-arched neck. He was touched, and their eyes were joined by a bond that was bodily. The wave of this once-known pain subsided into its axis of distance, and its hum dispersed into the webs and packets of warm Sun flying into the algae: for it was his own brain he was seeing reflected in the translucent housing over the algae. The thing he had thought about but never seen.

But then more. He saw himself from several sides; but more, his sight could be seen; he saw his seeing; that is, his sight took solid shape reaching to his brain. In corners appeared those strands he’d found before, strands of resilience loosening and tightening.

A shadow was not as far as the capsule wall. It did not reach the wall. It was not a shadow. He saw it from many sides, and when he thought just how many, he got more caving all around and he tried not to want to be someplace else. Far off he had tremors of the neuroblastings. He did not know what they were doing. But he did not need to know. He looked for the twined strands of resilience. He remembered chiasma because he had wanted to try to cross if at the last moment they divided him so his sides were cut off from one another. But look — he had more than two sides, and he went everywhere.

A vein of crimson glowed from the shadow that was not a shadow, then went to another place, and a new burn tore Imp Plus outward.

He looked in vain for the spiral twine of the strands, the strands of resilience coming apart then rushing back together again.

The caving pains went with the crimson glows.

And Imp Plus knew the more that was all around came from him.

But the two slivers.

Imp Plus did not think the slivers came from him; but before this thought, that chance had existed.

The slivers had drifted up before he had seen them. They hung near. But they could not have come out of the algae beds close by without passing through the oblong plastic that housed the beds. If the slivers were meant for him, he would have to see. The Good Voice had said, “It may be up to you.”

Imp Plus saw them, but now his sight toward them was not to be seen. That is, his sight of them was not to be seen moving toward them the way it moved toward the fraction that was himself. That is, it took no shape like the shapes of sight he could see reaching to his brain. Whereas between his sight and the slivers there was nothing except thin air.

And the slivers did not look like bits of those other sight shapes. His sight turned the slivers around so they gave off their gray-gold light. Through some vestige of pitch or yaw held tight now by different distances, the slivers leaned. But of themselves they did not move.

The slivers were so still they might belong.

They fit somewhere. There was no waste. Yet here were the slivers in the middle of the capsule as unsupported as a thing in orbit.

Imp Plus did not answer Ground.

The slivers were so small that at some angles their filament shine was more than they themselves. Yet they were not fractions, Imp Plus thought. Not like the tilted hemisphere adrift over near the bulkhead with a scrap dangling down.

But the equal slivers looked complete in themselves. Sheer pins. Clear needles. With lengthwise parallels of transparency inside each whole transparency.

In proportion long, in size the slivers were small. When he looked at them he could lose sight of everything else around him. So when he refocused on the rest around him, or then refocused on the slivers to see the silver points at each end, he got long tickles of ache, a polar axis trying to pivot in him.

Ground reported transmissions from numbered areas. But since Imp Plus had desired the Dim Echo not to answer, Imp Plus felt these new transmissions might be the spasms set off in him when he looked back and forth between the slivers and the rest around.

The spasms had length but were not long. This was true also of the crimson veins that glowed like light in caves briefly seen.

Now at one end of each sliver changes were piling in that were hard to see. Bird knees like grasshopper elbows riding in by the million folded up into a silver point on each sliver. Waves came.

There were other places to be.

Imp Plus was here.

Still, in the green and golden sunlight of the algae beds and their glassy cover, he found an idea that he was becoming someplace else.

For he saw this brain of himself from points and sides that were outside it. So for a second that stretched the burn of the cavings into the once-known other pain beyond burning that hummed waves along an axis of distance, he decided he was in a dream on Earth. He had dreamt it in several places before the start of Operation TL. He had dreamt he was looking at what was left; and when he tried to take in breath, he had no lung. But this dream had made the bare brain a lighted, scaleless specimen from a photo lens. While what he had here differed.

He fell toward his brain or away from it. This changed its size. He passed from spoke to spoke of his sight moving around the brain so it seemed to turn. And most of all it was open to floods of lumen, Sun streams of tracer nuggets each one so wholly precise it bent an additional, completing Sunlight along the flank of its intensity so overshadowingly more than intensity that it was dimension that might be frequency itself.