Joseph McElroy - Plus

Here in Earth orbit he leaned out in all the axes of his spines to this force that had him but that he had not learned to touch. The force was dispersed in the outlying parts. It was like an idea if Imp Plus only knew idea . It was the idea of his sight. Or the force of place where sight grew. Or the chance of place which force inclined to find. He leaned down the one axis of distance. But then he could not. For he had seen how he had slipped toward a secret he would have from himself, a secret kick he would have from himself by recalling the woman’s moist touch all round him by the body he once had had but did not now have. This secret leaning had seen itself, brain and limbs merging in a mutual inclination of sight, or change of chance: so the first leaning was displaced by the second leaning: this second leaning was not one axial incline but a spread from one of several possible centers, and a spread of the caving-pain that made him laugh back and budge the four outlying limbs or necks bedded with membranes and their growth and with that underlying offer feeling its way through their plasm. Before, from outside, his brain had been, he now saw, small or then huge only because motion in his membrane-sight had made that so. And what he’d thought to be sight projected solid toward the luminous vessel of brain was really a solid that happened also to have sight. And the shifting look of the brain-stuff as he’d leaned round and round the brain, was real change in the brain’s face.

But what could he do? What of the light? It had lessened. It still wound into all the parts like smoke into sinus. But the light had lessened.

He did not know. But he felt a lip of fold unwind that he could only have seen had he put himself forth onto an outlying limb membrane. And he wished not to do that. For the lowering Sunlight still warm in flood gave him a feel that was not alone the Sun’s movement but his too. A feel of many mouths opening that had not been before.

Imp Plus had laughed into the smiling mouth that had said, “Vanity.”

For he had seen through the glinting peeper of the dune: it was a shadow monitor, a person from the Project: so perhaps they had not implanted a monitor in his car that was drawn up at the end of the dune road.

But that was it! His slivers were electrodes! He had known them long ago. Though not where they’d be implanted.

For a moment the limbs or necks or wings seemed to know.

Know what?

Ground said Imp Plus should begin to think of getting ready for some shut-eye, but would Imp Plus please give latest glucose readings. And Imp Plus wondered Ground should say such things when Ground had never needed Imp Plus for such data.

Or had not till now, with the electrodes popping out.

The sliver that the brown woman had brought to his arm in California had been big and not small like the slivers here. Not an electrode. Though with a needle at one end.

Now the limbs or wings or necks or spokes pulsed a milky glow so the cycling of the late light received a salute.

Imp Plus knew that the more that was all around and was from him was growing from his brain.

It did not come to him. It went from him. He could not stop knowing that it was to be taken away from him.

If everything was to go away from him maybe it would go away after dark came. Through the lessening light he made out no change in the membrane spokes. Except what began to be a bend in one.

He saw that his sight was not shifting as frequently now from widespread haze to clear and back. And saw that while he was able to think his sight into his outlying limbs he did not.

Because he wanted not to. And the desire had outstripped the memory of why he’d wanted not to.

This thought turned into the caving and burned him inside out. Not on an outlying membrane but close to home, though with that same feel of being independent of him.

He had wanted to stay centrally put and not be dispersed into reaches of himself that were the unknown locus of the spokes. This thought had launched the growing pain all over again. Though it now ripped outward an inside he saw now was curious.

So he had to see it. As he’d seen the glial glue-blasts lapse into independent units of sponge which broke and were more glue-blasts than before. Likewise the fibers had pulsed sideways in the old eye tracts at whose head the fibers had been blocked by the emptiness where they’d been severed.

They pulsed sideways instead: into the temporal lobe, he thought.

Where Ground had given kicks, it said.

Which Imp Plus, said Ground, had given back in return in prefrontal areas 9 and 12. Taken in one place, given back in another.

Since the light was less, he did not have to see as much. So maybe he thought more.

What stopped him? Was he now his own sight? Yes, if he could consent to be dispersed. He could flow freely among the spokes forever. Or receive pulses from Ground as the three jettisoned slivers received from Ground waves of pulse like grasshopper elbows coming on the frequency like an absence of obstacle.

The brown woman who had brought the large sliver to his arm had first come and taken his pulse. Pounding pain was what he’d had, but she had taken his pulse and gone away.

What she’d brought back was not his pulse, it was the sliver, the large one that went into his arm at the bend.

But where was his pulse? He had asked the brown nurse for it. He recalled her, and recalled nurse .

And now in orbit the stranded optic fibers had re-aimed themselves by pulsing sideways out through the tract wall making the code map of where they were going as they went. Imp Plus wondered if this was Earth giving back his pulse. And there was his sight outside the brain. It shifted between fine haze and the single clarity of contours drawn on a blackboard that was green. But the point was that it shifted by pulsing. The pulse came from a place.

Imp Plus looked for the waves folding into the slivers. But he saw only the slivers. Imp Plus thought to answer Ground but did not open his Concentration Loop to the gauge in the agreed way, and said only: GLUCOSE GOOD. GLUCOSE BEAUTIFUL.

Imp Plus wondered if he knew how to activate that Concentration Loop to the gauge any more. The Dim Echo knew, but Imp Plus had let the Dim Echo go.

Imp Plus found, inside the lantern of the brain, hairs like sea threads that beat together. But together as separate sets. That is, one set beat slowly, the next fast, another uneasily yet in its own back-and-forth flow. So Imp Plus singled the Earth line and this was harder now than concentrating to the glucose gauge line, but then he stopped wanting to report the hairs to Ground. He had seen the hairs less long but noticed them only now in the lower light when they were not growing. He let the Earth line go, though Ground might answer his good and his beautiful . He wanted to look. But when he did, the beatings divided and divided and divided into a feeling that was greater than what Ground and the Dim Echo could count, and greater than darkness.

When he became aware all at once of many sets of hairs each steady in its own slow, fast, even or unvaryingly uneven beat, there turned out to be more. He went from an end to another end of his sense so some sets made a line. Then he moved back a rank or up a rank. When the rungs seemed parallel to each other, the angles began to turn. So the ladder became a round ladder. But the roundness veered somewhere and was more a net. The net spread its sets or knots of tiny hairs so that as he looked, this motion was a run of space curved along an ever reopening chance of gradients.

Which, by looking to see more, he multiplied.

He looked for where the pulse of many pulses came from.