Joseph McElroy - Plus

But the rungs of his grip also looked forward for something to do and closed toward each other, the backward-bound forward rung a bit higher than the forward-bound after rung. But they slowed.

They were approaching the gland of flame. It had now spread out powering the islands above. A power thought that Imp Plus felt was not only light.

Yet he knew that it was not for fear of that stored power that the rung ends of his caliper grip came to a halt here. Rather they were being dragged outward. Dragged by fatigue and by its opposite. Dragged by the sight of the smell tendrils in the frontal brain homing back out of the bulb-tipped horseshoe toward other tendrils coming laterally from the truncated eye tracts. Dragged too by the joint leaning which, closer, was the finest movement up toward those buoyed islands and out toward the widening clefts of dusk in the capsule. Dragged also then by a memory grown new in the rungs by a reach of act’s breath taken, inhaled, used, and given back by desire for act to then inhale.

Each rung now was an old radius turned spindle: turning free of the uncompleted ellipse of his pincer grip to spin through the evening spaces of the brain.

Till the grip itself turned, and was the sweep arc of this oval hemisphere: the place he had felt himself in when he could feel himself in one place not two.

Some eye tendrils had joined some smell tendrils. Some of these had divided into the sea hairs, and some had swayed away from pause as if slowly to surprise themselves with what they would think — and had reached up through the flanks of the brain to lean in parallels near the gorge of certain more active clefts. New hollows leaned not toward the light which had all but gone, but to each other.

The sweep arc was the hemisphere in motion.

A locus helmeting his home.

Housing in its course if not a true hemisphere a whole flash of relations flowing through every distance which idea would reach to touch, flowing as all the sides of his sight. From this center he would see now more clearly than any pulse from Ground would tell him what had gone on in the large green room on Earth where the Good Voice and others agreed on unknowns, and in the small green room where the Acrid Voice coughed up knowns. See now more clearly than the Acrid hand sweeping back around and down and in along the bottom to complete a chalk ellipse.

Imp Plus from his new center with its layers of trees and skeins of light headed through ventricle reservoirs, saw what the woman did with his pulse. She took it and went away and came back with a syringe instead. A disposable syringe.

For what?

Imp Plus felt a turn that was not this locus turn. He did not know where it was. It did not fit. It came with what he knew was the growth pain; but it wasn’t painful. He would look for the Dim Echo. He would find words in the Dim Echo that would tell what the California woman’s syringe did. He knew he had known. But he did not know why he did not now know. He knew there were two California women, the beach one and the nurse. He was losing them. Or a way between them.

He thought what the gland below the island had done with its flame. He tried to know what now a clear cluster of dim edges did turning into a line to lean toward the new turn — this new turn — that he’d just felt but could not place.

However, he might try to know what the cluster did, the cluster spilling into a line knew what to do, he thought. Yet it was some part of him, he knew — the cluster, the line, and the doing. He looked into the cluster that had turned into this line and he saw the tiny suck that he’d seen before, or its process, or slide, and near it he saw ovals. They were for nourishment and had a name he could not place and had smaller things going on inside where not so many had been before. His sight found sugar and in the same row its resulting absence. A net narrowed and drew through him, like that cylinder or like that gut. Drew through him toward the distant turn or bend that was not here any more than he was the center. He let himself be drawn out looking back to the nonetheless near oval shapes and the membrane suck, itself unseen not because Imp Plus failed but because it was a gradient event. It pumped against the gradient flow, this suck, as if needs of some potential blood remembered from the Sun wished to open constantly some wondrous inequity between inside the cell and outside in the sea about it. So the suck slid its charges across the skins of cells. A smell of sugar and burning came with Imp Plus, who was not home and knew he was not lost but did not understand the brain or his sight of many sizes.

Except one thing — as Ground, asking what was GLUCOSE BEAUTIFUL, requested another reading since glucose was too high: one thing Imp Plus knew was that they would not give him this sight of many sizes if they had it to give.

Down through great thicknesses of pulses Imp Plus looked back to the chasm which the rungs had bridged and he found now through the chasm a motion that was not his, and for a moment the chasm parted him into a fear that was neither the broken, divided operating table becoming a chair or the breaking of his body from what would be kept, but was the dividing of him from himself. He thought he would be glad of the Dim Echo’s presence. He heard Ground speak of sleep, and he was of two minds but did not know mind .

But even before he was drawn up almost like the hand of the Sun in what the Dim Echo now called, at different moving distances, “Premotor cortex,” Imp Plus knew a sprinkling of centers but no one center.

This cleft was narrow still but Imp Plus felt on him a webbed bulge as he reached the lip of the capsule’s dark. Off by a bulkhead he made out a slope of the hemisphere where it had been hanging adrift before. A pale light touched the window. The first window ever built into an IMP. But no reticle had been imprinted on the window because no man would be there to— to land , said the words — no — to measure position. But the window thought for itself; he remembered that; but could not see if the window thought of him.

There was light through it. Imp Plus did not know if the light was stars or (and the word came on the old axis of distance) the Moon.

He could not spot the slivers now or recall the thing the woman had done with the syringe. But the turn he had felt before in the lighted heart of the brain, he now saw: the bend he had noticed still earlier out there in one spoke or reach had grown around and so far that now it nearly touched the adjacent limb. Or had it moved but not really grown?

But as if to prove Imp Plus was watching, the bend moved. And the Dim Echo very close by was saying to Ground, O.K.

For Ground had ordered Imp Plus to sleep.

But Imp Plus did not sleep. He let the Dim Echo do his sleeping for him, was that it? Yet also Imp Plus did not know sleep. The word for it from Ground felt like a line along a middle between sides. But he did not know sleep. He saw large and small. All that was new about this was that he knew he’d been doing it for many turns of day and night so he wanted words to count the turns and he thought to draw these words to him along the axis of distance.

But to where?

He was at the narrow cleft. It was a cleft of the brain. Back down the cleft when he looked the dim facets that had been in a line leaned away and withdrew to be again a cluster.

But a cluster now with a pollen shine and a glint of net.

Which had not been seen when this cluster of pump, oval, and other small motions had turned to a line just when Imp Plus had let himself be drawn out to the narrow cleft in what the Dim Echo had called premotor cortex.

Where to see the Dim Echo?

Imp Plus looked, and the clustered facets inclined again to this cleft he’d been drawn to. Other clusters everywhere did also, singling down to brief lines in his direction. They reached at him, and he could be the Sun out of sight around a corner and they were inhaling to drag out of the brain’s night this light that was left.