Joseph McElroy - Plus

Saw then?

Saw now.

But if they didn’t milk it, said the Good Voice, where was the milk going to come from? The fields? The shining sands? Ovals chalked on greenboards by minds?

Imp Plus did not know mind . But now in the long night whose length held other nights spent in space with the Dim Echo, he knew the Acrid Voice’s answer: Give the Sun an outside chance.

Man the Sun, said the Good Voice.

No, coughed the Acrid Voice, just let the Sun show us.

Let it support us, said the Good Voice. Fix nitrogen in the beds, crash solar wind into it, get carbon in an energy-rich reactive state.

Let the Sun, said the Acrid Voice, dream up a life-support system.

Manned missions are over, said the Good Voice.

But over what? thought Imp Plus now, wanting to see: what he now at once then did see: a round of micropumps that had become one run conduct themselves toward wherever the heart was that pumped his clear life-humor.

Over what? came his own answer — and the failed run retracted into the rounds and rounds of tiny pumps he had thought to find the start of.

Over what?

For what had Imp Plus been, at the last, but an ill body over an ill will? Divided then, but into what? Divided into orbits.

He got ahead of himself but was afraid he had stopped. And the thought of light that he had leaned into unknown inclinations to chase now spun or spread all ways away from him, except that he saw that he was it. He got the idea that there was less spin per thought now, but the idea did not change what he looked at.

What was Imp Plus to have done out among these orbits?

Read readings Earth read too. Get some Sun. Be weightless. Subsist. Travel light. He picked what to see and he saw large and small, but he could not have less than this power, and what use was it?

The woman had said “Travel light,” but that wasn’t Operation TL. Her wants were not of Operation TL.

Were his?

He was expected only to react. Like the algae.

But not like the algae, for the algae had no Concentration Loop to speak through.

It is all for you, the Good Voice said.

There were other tests in the dark capsule. What was the hemisphere adrift?

Imp Plus thought how to use the Concentration Loop and thought that he might not know how any more.

Earth’s transmissions had gone away.

And here, there was less motion per thought; let Earth come round the other side when it was ready.

All for you, the Good Voice said.

But all what?

Look, said the Acrid Voice in the other room, it’s the algae and the other test beds — that’s what it is — and they don’t need you, you need them. You could turn green like a broccoli.

Like a hand of spinach. More likely, spun into some substance, some unmanned substance.

The Concentration Loop to which the Acrid Voice had introduced Imp Plus should become second nature; but what it was for was Earth: to get Imp Plus’s reactions by frequency impulse back to Earth.

That’s all you get out of it, pure and simple, a voice had said, and Imp Plus had reacted against the smile that had come with the voice because he could not bear it. He had foreseen himself alone. That was it.

There in the smaller green room and the capsule-to-come, he had foreseen himself alone. For the voice that said, “That’s all you get out of it,” was the Acrid Voice that later had said, “You can’t go on forever,” and Imp Plus saw only now orbiting the night that he had turned toward the door leading to the large green room where the Good Voice made plans — but Imp Plus had not gone to that door. And Imp Plus had known something besides the words “I’m ill” coughed back at the Acrid Voice. He’d known that the Acrid Voice was more alone than the Good, and had made himself so.

And this had made Imp Plus more mad than had the Acrid Voice’s parting remark: which was that Imp Plus might find a way to use the Concentration Loop to talk to himself.

The desire to show them grew in Imp Plus like the drift of substance which he saw now was just what he desired to show. In the outlying membranes the layers of light were lower but had spread. He wanted to say what he thought had been happening through the night. But he might not see this till he tried to say it. He wanted to have what the Dim Echo had.

He would tell better where the Dim Echo was when the Dim Echo stopped sleeping. He thought when the time came Ground would draw the word SLEEP back, for Imp Plus had once felt it as a line along a middle and saw he had not stopped feeling this.

But did not want to do things by halves.

And did not see halves when he looked. Yet did not see the Dim Echo at all. Yet through another night saw that once there had been no Dim Echo.

The night with the woman by the Mexican fire.

Not the woman at the California sea.

The pale one on the night plateau.

Slept with her. He had said SLEEP. What he had meant, he could ask the Dim Echo, but the Dim Echo had not been there around the fire and it was Imp Plus who had said to the woman when they had come back out of the dark and he sat warming a foot that hurt and taking something painful away from the foot until the woman wanted to do it, and it was not fingers she took away from the foot because the fingers were in what he was telling her, the fingers had been his own but meshed and tangled by the child who was not there in the Mexican night with them and who made him try to move the finger she pointed to and he moved the wrong one — and after telling the pale woman this, he had said words that made her laugh and she said he made her feel like a new widow ready to start over again. The words he had said were “Sleep with me.”

But he could not remember what this had meant, if it had meant SLEEP.

He had been very close to her on the ground by the colors of the fire, and his yellow shoes were near her dark hair. There were shifts of substance.

The lumens of the glucose arcs had spread through the night and would have looked lower like the levels of light along the outlying membranes but, more than lower, they were spread. But then Imp Plus understood.

His lights could be lower now because they were being answered.

But the transmission everywhere was not on a frequency. It was too slow or too fast to speed. It came from more than just its own places, and it was first another darkness but it was more a kind of change, and it was not something that Imp Plus himself did, but it visited and stayed with the substance of what had been done, and divided this not into two but into all the mornings Imp Plus had known.

It was the Sun, and the first far thought of the Sun’s breathing.

The Sun was coming back.

And Imp Plus was coming back to the Sun.

This was his deed? He would show the Acrid Voice.

The deep gland flamed out at his sight, and along the seam that slanted down behind the gland the yellow-soaked field of cells had faded. And behind it and deep below the gland brief sections of stripe showed through the crevice which one rung of his will had once passed over. And seeing through the crevice to these sections of stripe — they were tubes — he understood that the tubes were not him but went from him; and were the same tubing he’d seen going into the algae; understood that if the algae and anabaena and other test beds had no Concentration Loop to speak through, they did have loops to Imp Plus.

He could watch through the crevice and yet, like a breathing from all sides, feel waves of substance go through him, which was also the recollection of what had gone on in the night.

When he looked off to the window that he recalled could think for itself and where no grid had been printed for no man would be here to use it to map position, Imp Plus could hardly say what he saw in what he had once seen as the outside body growing from a thing he had thought his brain.