Joseph McElroy - Plus

And the Dim Echo in a sigh it could not have wanted to make at the time of the launch where there had been no separation between a well-drilled Dim Echo answering to the name Imp Plus, and what had here come to be a new Imp Plus, observed that light-years was wrong, for the distance was that of a synchronous Earth orbit 22,300 miles from Ground.

But the sigh Imp Plus then saw was silent, and the information was unsaid. Likewise information he’d not known he had: that the on-board dilatometer measured expansion due to heat; that the Concentration Loop communicated from conscious brain to Ground by electrodes; that limbic was a system in the core that was connected to the nerve bodies of the hypothalamus.

Wait.

He would not stop for these packets of Ground-bound data banked into him by Dim Echo. They brought Ground back to him probing for why glucose held at maximum and whether connection between water gauge and water had stopped working, for water must be much lower than Ground’s reading.

Imp Plus did not want to know.

But as he recalled the Good Voice’s “Go ahead, feel free to look around, it’s all yours,” he found himself gathering, like the gatherings of his multi-membrane microsight, that the island bodies that had been sucked from the brain into the limbs were parts of the hypothalamus, and that the wildly glancing knots or packets of his own sun spindling down the tube from brain to algae were units of radiance. He knew radiance, but not he felt from the Dim Echo. And he gathered also that the other brainward tube was for nourishment. And looking for the now flattened brain the cerebrum (which then swelled a bit as he looked but not back into the cerebral wig-shape) and looking, too, for the flattened little brain the cerebellum behind, he felt the Dim Echo separate inside him and make him like a memory wonder if the body he had grown unhelped by Ground was the conscious brain’s opposite.

But no — he found substance not mainly different from substance beyond, he found centers but no center; new fields of streaming points slid or deflected everywhere dissolving some one dark source into bright shadows; his body-probe thumbing the window glass smelled sea sands running through a salt-sweet porous hand which was her hand. He found the flaming gland still where it had been, but its glimmer dispersed into all of him, and not only the breathing motion which was himself expanding and contracting, but a tide of equally growing inclination spread all over with each motion of his breath.

But more than breath, and here was almost the thought he had not been equal to before. It was a thought he inclined toward but it had been in him always and he must think it. So he looked at the radiation units that spun into radii for the algae gases to embrace. And he looked both near the gland of flame and at the pearly hemisphere adrift at a bulkhead, and seeing at the same time blue dart and crimson flash about his shifting substance, he saw Ground’s words make a mouth on Earth: and when Imp Plus wished Ground to vanish, his sight blew a hole in itself and shot up to hang by no thread, and was a sliver. Which he saw was an electrode that had been the gray glinting button in the middle of the very sight membrane which itself had worked and mulled its way up into the scalp of the brain and thus skewered itself.

He inclined toward the thought he must think by looking at several things at once which he had been able to do before, for his sight was multi and micro and threatened to be too powerful to help and must be limited. Ground was silent as Imp Plus inclined toward the thought he thought he could now handle. Imp Plus’s just digested Dim Echo helped him project pulses into the Concentration Loop to test Ground on the red and the blue that the Dim Echo did not answer. But Ground did not either.

In the silence, Imp Plus could handle the hemisphere by lengthening himself and by moving himself. But as he moved from where he’d smelled the window, the cave-crash pain was worse than before; for on an axis of distance and of vegetable and animal, he had been grinding a mesh of wheels of teeth — ground the mesh away into a dust which he must then save by breathing.

And choking, and lightly tapping the hemisphere with the part of him that could smell and could thumb, he was able to handle that thought.

That before had turned him from the window.

Like a drawing in of all his sense.

Here.

He was glad Ground was through. Glad that after reaching orbit he had sprung his own housing. For that was what the cloud-blue-mottled hemisphere was. The safe housing over what had been the brain.

The thought he could handle now was more cause to cut Ground off. For Ground would use him. Use even the thought.

Which was that with the help of the Sun he could think his own growth.

He stood away from this thought. It came over him everywhere. Newer parts of him nudged each other’s outlines of light and sometimes joined. So he was not just increasing.

He could become less, when two skins of lumen inclined together and were one skin and then this filament between dissolved. He stood away from the great thought that he had thought. But it had settled over him and covered him. So he rid himself of it by letting it do what it would do. So it was falling as slowly as snow once had seemed to fall, lowering so slowly he took long to see that its slow movement was also a lifting. From below, a lifting up but not away.

He stood away, he thought, from this thought: the thought that he could think his own growth. But he found it all around, growth and thought, thought and growth, it opened and was close and he felt it was himself but felt it was less.

But still he stood away. He had to.

Sometime he had said the words sad and alone , but he did not know them and wondered if he could think them onto him but wondered where they were stored if he could recall.

He stood away from the thought that he could think his own growth.

How could he have choked on the dust those axes had ground? For he had nothing to choke with. No head and neck — for that was where choking choked. Blue in the face. Yet heads had eyes that saw. And he saw.

He saw the thought of his own growth risen and fallen, land and lift.

But he stood away from it. He tried to know it was there and done by him. But to stand or be away he found himself thinking again why choked . What did choke mean? He had nothing to choke with. Still there was what was choked on: for he saw that where his tucked frond tip thumbed and smelled the window, the window shifted and poured and dropped the sands it was made of, dropped them into blue morning space. Meanwhile, at the same time, so easily he thought what was the use, the slow-flaming gland that was a last centering sign of what had been the brain now bulbed its flux up over the dulled tints of the optic tracts and their crossing.

All of a sudden the gland’s force had flooded and slowed the wheeling Sunbraids of the midday cells. So Imp Plus found no point to this ease of the gland’s power. At the same time the wings or spoke-fronds had paused in their many forms, and one was now grown into and through what had been a main land and luminous reservoir of what had been the cerebrum: so this wing or neck at this moment of sluggish halt was a body of bridge pinning or belting a lower cross-lamina of substance illumined in turn by the two glancing tubes that entered the underhousing where the disc pump was. But the tubes’ streams brainward or for that matter plantward barely moved now, any more than the other reaches of flesh, pinions, outline, or fronds of him moved. And the dropping of the sands to clear the window glass joined the stubborn glimmering gland’s pointless force thickening impedance, and joined the gathering fixity of his unengaged new being’s range of differences to think as if for him; and he choked.