Joseph McElroy - Plus

He wanted to say.

But he could not speak to Ground, for what would Ground do? And he had to get something from the Dim Echo and wasn’t about to join the Dim Echo in sleep to get whatever he found he wanted.

Dawn deepened the tube loops. A thing was there which, going far back to the woman in the night plateau or his madness and towering, twisting headache at the Acrid Voice’s parting words, was a wonderful thing: it was that the currents in the tubes moved two ways. They fed from the test beds to him. And they moved out also from him.

And knowing he was all but ready to face the new growth that was now to be seen after this night that sometimes seemed to hold many nights, he was an inclined field of racing independent parts or gaps wanting to tell the Acrid Voice that Sun without doubt came also from himself, from Imp Plus — wanting so much that he called back from the smaller green room words to the effect that he might find a way to use the Concentration Loop to talk to himself: but the words had not been said by the Acrid Voice; they had been said by Imp Plus, and then the Acrid Voice softly added, “You will,” just as less than a year later he would softly reflect the Good Voice’s word recreation .

The Good Voice’s permission had probed the midbed of Imp Plus’s known body, but mainly through the dune-watcher-to-come with his dark glasses reflecting where one known Imp Plus met one known woman with skin that would never be his but that if he wanted with enough force he could have.

He felt knowns waking in him. Known solar panels over a known project’s known power needs.

But known divided by known gave unforeknown increase.

Earth was calling, but Imp Plus felt for the fingers of the Sun which were his own fingers too. But not his old ones, the ones that came together out of space to join to make a parchment shine of crisscross called the palm of his hand.

New fingers of Sun and himself. Tracts of unknown begun from the widowing of a brain.

Or what came to him as ill body over ill will, known over known he had thought, but not so: for the ill will was not just in how the Solar Energy Project Operation Travel Light had used him out of the goodness of its voice — the ill will had been his own as well. Desire that all that smoke fall back into the Acrid Voice and choke it, and only because the Acrid Voice did not smile upon him like the Good Voice, for whom Imp Plus must have had another and unknown fire of hate.

Desire had met the Sun. The arcs of lumen and glucose lumen wheeled not from Imp Plus and not from the Sun, but from their mingling that was deeper than touch.

Near the bulkhead the dislodged hemisphere stood adrift. When he had seen its segment glimmer in the dark night of the capsule he had recalled a picture of the Earth, and he thought what he saw he hadn’t thought before: that the hemisphere did not heed him.

Earth could go on calling forever.

Earth had woken the Dim Echo.

What Imp Plus saw now in the light of dawn was more than he had seen, and in a spasm at the unfolding premotor cleft he was glad Earth did not know.

Imp Plus saw himself.

Him.

He found it on his mouth and in his breath. Him . A thing in all of him. But now he wasn’t sure. He saw he’d felt this him in the brain. But where was it now? In too many centers.

And there was a shifting like the subtraction of a land mass so two or more seas that had been apart now slid together. What happened to this him?

Then it fell away into the damp muscles of light. He saw them from this cleft-fold that had been through so much. Saw with angles of the fold itself. Its angles spread while he looked with them.

Wait.

He did not.

That is, he would not. If he would not wait, did he then go?

He was Imp Plus and had no name before Imp Plus. But he was not a vegetable, In the word of the blind news vendor who had said he would not be just a vegetable.

Imp Plus gave light, though he was no star. His light answered the Sun and came from the Sun. But more, for it went to the Sun too and was a thing Imp Plus did. He was no star but a being that did not look like a star yet was called one. And the earlier shadows of his body on the capsule bulkheads — he knew body —had looked like starlings. The wings and tails, not the motion.

But there had been motion in the shadows. And more than the red glowing at points around the body which he was using to look at the red. He remembered red-cell ghosts; not from the green-and-white blackboard of the Acrid Voice mapping what might be ahead but from his own thought — he had thought about ghost cells with the red missing, for the red breathed. Was it the red glowing here at points?

Starfish. The standing woman had folded herself to bend down to take its sandy arms and legs out of the underwater and he had felt its stiff flesh and put it back in the water. The starfish was hard to see now. He could find it in himself if he tried not to see the motion in his own webbed membrane limbs; but he was no starfish.

He drew parts of his sight out of different, stranded distances, he thought; but he wanted to only after he saw they had come of themselves, yet they were always himself, so he drew. Drew them so that using them together to view window or muscle or cleft-fold he found each was the radius of a color: of diamond-brown (from a membrane-knuckle bent against a bulkhead), of leaning olives (from inside the brain where the old eye ways crossed), or of bare reds (where a sinew of contraction solved the morning Sun): for the radius of a color is not everywhere the same, he saw. It drew these certain parts of his sight together into a point as brief as the space was large that he had once found he could make by division and division when he tried to see between the white gel of a glue (or glial) cell and the twig cells that fired their bud ends from time to time across this divisible space and sometimes split into other twig cells that did not fire but only divided.

This brief point was bright.

A moment in sequence, a sequence so packed it looked like fluid. So grand a moment that for its focal time the different distances came in into the axis of single seeing with a sound: a compound he had not prepared to remember. A host of fluids lengthened into bonds of vibration that slid into so near a body he started to forget he could not rest in its music. But stopped. No. He did not want to rest there, and he would not.

He found he had known music; but this music of his seeing kept the voice of Ground as dim as another frequency. But what he was seeing he saw now he had seen before. Seeing a skin of flesh now, then seeing into some sponge of blond lumen blood, then now seeing clear through what he saw he’d already decided was transparent. These he saw now as before though more clear and with a weight of knowing.

Where was this weight? It was gathering.

But gathering everywhere; that is, spreading.

The weight inclined at all angles, and slid. The slides were of substance, but the weight was separate. The substance could be of granules, with greater space between each the more he desired to see. Granules that were slick rolling masses shifting from outer to inner, he had thought, and inner to outer.

He would not stop the motion to see the wavings of spines joined at their soft, blurred bulb-tips into angles in which a wing came into being to tread a wind of space. But unless he stopped the many motions he might not see this glassy meat, this aerial act, and this whole slow-armed cup whose wing points — whether or not it was when they bumped the bulkheads — then flattened into sides.

With corners.

Which became new tips pointing off as if to do what then they did do.