Joseph McElroy - Plus

Where was Cap Com?

Yet the word recreation that came from the Acrid Voice only reflected from the Good Voice. Though further back it was the Acrid Voice: saying, “You don’t want to go on forever.”

Said with an ill will.

While the Good Voice, always so sure, always stuck to the point: Overtime day in day out, to catch and milk the Sun.

That was the project. Capture.

In the dark cycle Imp Plus recalled the force of the Sun and what he had known before launch.

There was more of him now than at launch: more of him to do the remembering: yet did he now remember less?

But in other words.

The project was the Sun. Here was what he had been looking for when Ground had broken in: he’d been looking for where all these arcs of busy lumen wheeled from.

Ground spoke. Ground spoke. Imp Plus was believed to be in part awake. Imp Plus was asked if in the absence of a carbon-reaction gauge Imp Plus could feel a high coming from the algae conduits, for there was an outside chance nitrogen from the plants was getting into Imp Plus’s system raw so Imp Plus would be getting what water divers called rapture of the depths.

Imp Plus did not answer and felt no motion in the Dim Echo to do so.

Ground asked if Imp Plus was not answering in order to conserve power; Ground said waking and deep sleep were not possible at the same time, yet Ground read rapid low-voltage waves, which were waking, at the same time that it read volleys of high-voltage spikes and R.E.M. equivalents, which meant deep sleep; and Ground, in strange, patient detail, pointed out that the accumulator storing electrical energy from the cells in the solar arrays continued at maximum: but this could not happen, Ground said.

Imp Plus did not answer.

ARE YOU RECEIVING US IMP PLUS? IF YOU ARE RECEIVING US YOU MUST BE USING UP POWER.

In the dark, Imp Plus saw the paddles turning the wind, turning the wind into force. That was it.

But no, there was a difference: between what he saw when he looked at the arc-parts cycling the lights of the brain’s land and what he saw when he saw the great grid panels milling the wind outside in the black land of space. For there was no wind. There was no air where the panels milled the solar wind.

And they were not here, though they were of Imp Plus.

They were not inside the brain. But they were not inside the capsule, whose bulkheads were outside the brain or what he had thought the brain. The panels receiving the solar wind, which was no wind but a rain of rays, were of the capsule, but not in it, and he only thought he was seeing them.

Ground was outside the capsule, but it made sounds Imp Plus received inside. That was it. The oblong cells on the panels caught Ground and got Ground from outside inside. The oblong cells on the panels might not be the cells of Imp Plus, but they were part of what he was part of.

The cells were of the capsule but outside.

The oblong cells he saw, the grids of cells, the panels of grids of cells, he recalled pictures or other models of other craft maybe not IMP with windmill paddles that bore the panels of grids of cells; but did he really see? He heard them in the mixed voices Acrid, Good, and other.

He did not really see the cells because they were outside and he was always inside. Though on Earth he had been outside them once, and there were panels of cells but no windmill, the windmill was in his head, and a project voice not Acrid and not Good had been speaking into the head Imp Plus did not now have. The cells received the Sun and gave the capsule power to receive the Ground.

But now it was night — a night of nights dividing itself yet turning toward an end. There was no Sun outside, except very far outside: around a curve like the axis of distance, but greater: for this curve moved.

Which meant, he saw, that what Sun there was from the solar cells was saved from when there had been Sun. Saved as power.

With rapture, the Good Voice had said, “The Sun hits the arrays; it can’t get away. We got it.”

But was this trapped Sun the same as the Sun’s hand Imp Plus had found inside himself?

The Acrid Voice mingled more words, but said what Imp Plus was now able only to see: a rain of airless wind struck light through a mesh scraped from Earth’s skin; each drop of light punched a jot out of what the light hit, then each jot went for a hole but was made to go into a waiting stem. He thought himself divided between what he saw and what he had once only thought. He saw some jots skid off into space like a spacecraft whose bad angle re-entering is not bad enough to burn it up in the Earth’s atmosphere. He saw light turned into grains moving. But turned also into light.

Yes: light turned into light. It was not what anyone Acrid or Good had said happened, and so Imp Plus radiated waves of doubt that came along the axis of distance. But radiated them from himself, through and to himself. He saw that this light whether tapped for use or stopped was turned to just motion: but doubt or not, the light hitting the panels of gridded cells had turned to light. Imp Plus went across the field of what he thought was his brain wanting some sight that what he’d seen was true. Not sight of light so much as a thing about the light. But every turn along which he inclined to find support for what he’d thought, gapped into sudden holes: he might chase over an inner eyelid-skin of limit for what he knew was there, only to get fresh absence; or he leaned steeply into each subordinate void of hole to find it then gone and gone in such a speed of light he saw instead he thought a network lattice quite without speed. Or beyond speed, so the lattice bent always away from limit. Bent back constantly to what he might have thought to be himself, had not this deep substance been already him everywhere in all its grids and jots. His thought leaned after itself but was evaded. Not like the Sun’s many-fingered hand withdrawing, for what it left it left, and these lumens — fall, flow, pass as they must — still stayed put. What escaped was motion of himself. So the very brain, if it still was the brain, slid its canal beds — or, if he could have fixed himself at one point, seemed to slide and distribute its canal beds — and radiant layers of spark-smeared glue field and amber inclination away from themselves and toward some aim their nearing presence might have sent ahead.

He was standing at one point.

And he did not chase why light turned into light.

For it came to Imp Plus that support was so close at hand it was nowhere else, and he had been here before; or had seen these jots or particles punched out of cells by drops of light because he had seen missing from his own cells parts or particles which when their resulting absences overtook them looked identical to these particles or jots though these had been punched out by Sun drops and those others in himself expelled by radiance Ground could not understand was everywhere here and so had no need to be hunted down.

He could not hold the tan woman. She faded back into the dune watcher’s glancing glasses, but also into whole tan terrains of Earth implanted with fields of reflectors dishing up the Sun. More and more reflectors subtracting terrain, so that the future held fewer and fewer persons.

Subsisting.

But the fields of reflectors with their competing black bodies caught the Sun so slowly the Good Voice came between these fields with the project.

The last Apollos had long left the beaches of the Moon.

Where to go?

Man the Moon.

Over my dead body, said the Good Voice.

The Acrid Voice coughed and coughed, but wanted nothing of the kind.

The Sun was the thing, the Good Voice was always saying.

A beautiful living bomb of a cow, the Good Voice and the Acrid Voice said when Imp Plus drew their words together. Milk it, said one. Feed it, said the other; and acrid laughter joined ill will, and Imp Plus saw the ill will was not against him.