Joseph McElroy: Plus

Could that be?

Impulses on a frequency from Earth raised questions but not that question. Earth had raised Imp Plus and could be rid of him.

Something had been taken away.

From Imp Plus.

Yet he had wanted to get away, he remembered. The impulses drew him in again away from the shadows like birds cast on what could be a skull or grid if he had one. Small white birds with pink sides and black scissor-tails twice as long as their bodies. And after them a greater bird. Like a high, dark shearwater with wings three times the rest of it.

There was a project.

Against the gradient grid of the impulses drawing Imp Plus in from these now larger shadows with requests for enzyme action in chlorella, there was laughter.

Yet laughter then, not now; vibration bent out of its source.

The shadows around were more than birds.

Chlorella: that was the green, the vegetable. Inside the head of Imp Plus if there were a head, the blind news vendor said he himself could have been a vegetable but instead he’d taken hold.

The impulses seemed to bear their own answers for Imp Plus to free from the questions. The impulses made shadows on the gradient grid. Not the shadows coming around that were now more than birds, but shadows not seen. Yet also shadows that fell beyond the gradient grid and were the difference between the impulses now and then.

Yet nothing like the shadows Imp Plus saw around him on the inside of his skull that was not a skull.

ME READ reversed reads READ ME. The impulses themselves weren’t the reversal. Some other operation reversed them.

But new force had come in the impulses. It conveyed itself to Imp Plus in measures of new impedance, and the force wasn’t only the impulses from Earth which went on and on.

IMP PLUS CHECK GLUCOSE LEVEL. WE READ GLUCOSE UNSTABLE UP AND DOWN.

GROUND I READ YOU, said Imp Plus.

But his next answer seemed new. For he told Earth glucose levels had dropped. He took time to know this answer after he had given it to Earth.

IMP was said, and then PLUS.

And Imp Plus responded.

So did Earth.

IMP PLUS IMP PLUS DO YOU CONNECT LOWER GLUCOSE LEVEL WITH SLOWER RESPONSE TO TRANSMISSIONS? REPEAT: DO YOU CORRELATE YOUR SLOWER RESPONSE AND THOSE LOWER GLUCOSE LEVELS?

He thought of not answering, and this was a new thought, and he felt a trace of the thought all over, and like a ray he fell everywhere after the trace which was the absence close to his heart but alight with inclination that was more than gradient though it was gradient.

WAIT IMP PLUS. GLUCOSE UP NOW. GLUCOSE UP.

Imp was a word. So was Plus . On the Concentration Loop Imp Plus had answered messages from Earth that used the words Imp Plus . Imp Plus could talk.

IMP PLUS TO GROUND: ARE SPROUTS FROM OPTIC STALKS?

But from inside somewhere and not from Earth came an answer he had not requested in so many words: IMP was Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. The answer came from inside. From Imp Plus. Not from Earth.

But what (he asked inside his own new circuit and not to CAP COM on Earth), what is IMP PLUS?

And before he had the answer, Ground was heard in the impulses which Imp Plus now found harder to understand saying after a pause: NEGATIVE. NO OPTIC STALKS AFTER STAGE ONE OF OPERATION TL.

Laughter went up the grid, shadows more than lines. Laughter past. What was TL?

IMP PLUS DO YOU READ? DO YOU READ? REPEAT WHAT IS SPROUTS? WHAT IS SPROUTS?

The shadows on the walls were more. Not larger, not exactly smaller. But more. Like a tree grown out of birds. Now two birds: a bird with tail much longer than the rest of it seen from a car one early spring on Earth; and a bird with wingspread three times the rest of it seen once on Earth one late spring, seen by somebody who stood outside a car.

Imp Plus had not prepared to remember these.

And now desired only to obey his Operation TL frequency and answer Earth’s transmissions.

SAY AGAIN IMP PLUS. WHAT SHADOWS? CHECK DUAL ATTITUDE STABILIZER. WE READ NO CHANGE. CHECK ATTITUDE STABILIZER. IF YOU HAVE CHANGED ATTITUDE YOU MAY BE GETTING SHADOWS.

But Imp Plus had not said shadows to Ground.

The answer was that Imp Plus was able to think in transmission. Yet that was what the Concentration Loop was, to begin with.

Glucose level up: he had known that already. And as if Ground read his thought, Ground paralleled his answer: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS. GLUCOSE UP AGAIN. DO YOU READ?

And Imp Plus did not tell what was felt in all the holes, for each was its own: holes that x-rayed and darted after the particles that had made the holes until then the particles met a match in other particles of contrary lean and each pair in a new mutual gradient vanished as if becoming the hole that had been darting after them: and what was left after the new mutual gradients of all the pairs of magnet particles was more than absence and other than attraction. Then he knew what it was. It was a radiance. Radiance he thought he had not prepared for. And so instead of reporting the packed shadows all around or asking was it true he could change attitude, Imp Plus answered only himself, not Ground, and knew as he answered Travelling on light that he was answering with the Sun.

But Ground had read Imp Plus again without a transmission from Imp Plus.

But what came to him was Travel light . Operation TL was Operation Travel Light.

When did Ground read what he thought, and when did Ground not?

But what was here was the thing. And Ground was not here. Imp Plus was here in the gradient grids of light. And what there was more of was not only glucose.

There was more all around.

More where?

In the light. In the units of it which found their place in Imp Plus.

Imp Plus had had no sockets to hold the light. Or the darkness. He was patient. Darkness had gone on, and it had been steady and as familiar as Ground’s order SLEEP. But now Imp Plus was for the time being unable to think anything of that darkness.

Now there was more all around. Not darkness. Not just light. But more. So there might be sockets. Light that folded into Imp Plus was not the two bandages of the news vendor who could have been a vegetable but was not. The vendor was in Imp Plus’s head. And the vendor had sockets.

Imp Plus was full of new holes made by particles just departed. But the holes raced after them until the particles hit other particles and vanished to become the holes they had made, but to become more, which was a radiance.

Imp Plus thought, I am IMP PLUS.

But the words Imp Plus came also from Ground, as if distance like all the routine transmissions till now echoed Imp Plus without the I am .

Lately there was more all around. Holes in motion, holes of light in a lattice he knew on sight but had not seen before. He did not know lattice , did not know how he knew on sight these grids of moving light-holes, more and more of them. Nor how he knew orbit meant eye socket too.

Imp Plus wished to use the word and found other words to send with it: REQUEST PRESENT IMP PLUS ORBIT.

Numbers came back and he felt them in his head, a head for figures. But he had no head, though it was filled with light. Holes and lines of light. Lines spun. Spun round but also elsewhere like circles proving themselves a field. Lines whose spin he could slow by concentrating lines he then saw were each a radius detached.

He was amid the numbers for apogee, far point, and perigee, nearest point, getting them without incident; they were nearly the same. But then now the numbers were not in his head, he was outside, seeing only the shapes of the numbers.

As if he were those shadows on the bulkhead that was his skull.