Joseph McElroy - Plus

But then these lines of outflow slung their lengths back and were clusters. Imp Plus could have chosen to see the lines from many points, and points moving and not moving. He had chosen to. But he did not know if those lines, now withdrawn into clusters, had been as long as they had gone on.

All these works went on without him. Yet it was him they were.

A touch came. A message like the nurse’s needle. A point of force spread upon him to be a screen. The screen or plane had unfolded at the cleft except Imp Plus did not see how. For past the shadow of strands lax or tightening in the corners of his eyes, he could see out through the cleft as before to the capsule bulkheads and the glimmer of his growth. But wherever the plane or field was, once spread across it the force made him — or made him want to — move his eyes from one side to another and back.

Which made him want to have the eyes to do it with. Or want to think he had. For he knew he didn’t have.

Not eyes like those he’d lost that were like the woman’s other-colored eyes he’d smelled at the California shore.

Or seen and loved and wanted. Though not smelled, or not known he smelled, till here now tight or lax through sugars sliding from chamber to vein.

Not chamber or vein of eyes. Yet sugars. Lactic. Lactic sugars.

He had got somewhere almost.

And doubly. For he brought back, and instantly returned for an instant to, that after part of the brain through which the aft caliper of will had passed: the part which the Dim Echo sleeping nearby might give a name to and where the fine folds of muscle— muscle was the word — must wait and want for far-flung motions or motors to pass, seeking themselves. Not the rings of cell muscling the ends of the California woman’s rainbow iris in across the pupil’s gap in his memory, or one he thought was his. Instead, other muscles he could not find, but could want, but could not wait for.

He had come almost to see a thought. Which meanwhile like a constant map of him watched him , he thought, not he it.

Then the touch was gone, and he saw that it had not been like the nurse’s needle, which had made him lose sight of her. He looked to find the Dim Echo. But he found all the night cities of the brain as if he were not here. And he looked out past a brief, gray glitter at the lip of the cleft which he thought to be a membrane starting with the webbed bulge he had centered on, though he felt also everywhere. At an unknown distance hung a solid curve of dusky, blue-mottled pearl. He knew what he’d once seen on Earth but as quickly saw that he could not be seeing through the bulkhead — and the window was not in that direction. Beyond the lip of the cleft were the wings, necks, spokes, organs, exits, or entrances: which were maybe none of these, though he was sure of one thing, that they had gone from the brain.

But they had made the brain what he couldn’t find in himself to see: made the brain other than what they had come from. The map of how to get back changed.

The capsule was darker. Ground might have changed attitude. Over and in the chlorella beds a feeling of light constantly receded and was there. The outer light that was not the Sun but might be a distant milk of stars and had maybe named itself the Moon could itself have shifted.

The outlying parts were there, but they were him more than he could see them. Yet he saw what he saw. The bend curled in still more. For in the fine light of itself, it wanted to join the nearby limb, or keep going and curl back toward the brain.

The lights of the outlying membranes were under the membranes. Each light a layer of length going on holding the Sun that was not here now.

The cleft to which Imp Plus had felt drawn contracted as the outlying limb curled. But both stopped. Imp Plus had a slowness in the outlying limbs. Or did not now feel much of what was going on there. He was alone with himself. He thought this inside. The Dim Echo was near and inside, not off among the outlying plasms. The Dim Echo was asleep. With lights on. Asleep lighted by the glove of feelers the Sun’s departed hand had left. Did the wings sleep? What light disturbed their membranes? Light they gave themselves. Without eyes the Dim Echo was not disturbed by light. Here inside the brain — or what had been the brain from which whatever had sprung, the light stored from the Sun’s day was more than light.

Still, light helped Imp Plus see this. These flows.

In the gold shadow over each pale red flow he saw — but not till he should want to — a full galaxy of colors. They were what he’d seen when he’d first recalled the woman’s eyes. The gold shadow was also underneath. The gold shadow was what showed the other colors in the pale red. He could not tell if he now smelled the sweet flow or recalled the smell; he saw down inside and forward of the islands and the gland. Saw what he knew must be a different size — the tendrils not only glowing from the horseshoe lobes he and the forward rung had thought to be his broken smell, but also throwing toward these gold-shadowed pink flows motions like transmissions.

Waves.

Which he saw made what was not a flow at all but many single bodies of rainbow red that were even more a flow through the shadow gaps of gold between. And each body now turned, but in a smaller size, and flexed like a single muscle shorn to a weightless space on its own until with a sweet burn that did not pain Imp Plus each body receiving the waves became two bodies of a thicker but paler hue but soon were hard to see and came back as other bodies of that dilute red.

The light had been stored. But there was more and more.

And as if he had heard Earth before Earth spoke, he heard: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS CAP COM TO IMP PLUS ARE YOU COLD ENOUGH UP THERE IMP PLUS?

Again, touch came. It was a spasm, a jab of dryness on his tongue, and with it a need to move eyes he did not have from one side to the other and back and so forth. And so he did.

But then Imp Plus fixed his look upon the bodies and their flow and the rainbow range surfacing like a shadow of the gold, and he was able to stop the rapid eye motion set off by the touch. But there were so many bodies, his attention was drawn back to the lip of the cleft. Yet not just by the bodies and the unpleasant force that jabbed him to motions he knew he could not make alone, and not by the Dim Echo’s slow words (which Imp Plus kept to himself) SLEEP, SLEEP, LIGHT SLEEP PRECEDES DEEP SLEEP. COLD WILL COME WITH DARK CYCLE. No his attention was drawn back to the lip of the cleft by his own desire to have if not those lost eyes a hand.

Though not the hand he had looked at — a last look, a last look, for that hand was lost on Earth. No, another hand that he could only think at the long moment when the nurse’s syringe went in his arm at the bend which was unbent to receive it, and he looked away from the point to the palm with its parchment shine of crisscross and the fingers curving larger and larger the further they sank beyond. And he tried to hold his eyes but couldn’t.

But now there were no eyes like that. And he could push back the jabbing touch by wanting to. Or by looking down on the button glint of gray at his cleft’s lip in the premotor cortex.

See at the same time waves from Earth on course enter that gray-glinting crystal point.

Then he knew what it was. It was another sliver implanted here to touch Imp Plus. For Earth to touch him. The waves stopped. But the gray crystal now stirred above the dilating bulge.

Imp Plus waited he did not know how long, and then he made the rapid eye movements to see if he could without the electrode’s prompting. But he could not recall what this had been, for now he could not pass the one whole flesh and wedge of watching from here to there without seeing that he was already there waiting for himself. And yet as he hit upon this, he thought he became one more shift different. He was steadily not the same; or if not he, what had been his brain.